La Valise (1973) - film review

Finding himself the enemy of the entire Arab world, Commandant Bloch, a high-ranking Israeli spy, takes refuge in the French Embassy in Tripoli.  Captain Augier is given the task of smuggling Bloch out of the country in a diplomatic suitcase.  A strike at the airport thwarts the scheme and the two men are holed up in a hotel, in fact the very hotel where Bloch met the love of his life, Françoise.  Suspecting he was betrayed by his former lover, Block asks Augier to keep an eye on her.  Augier himself ends up falling in love with Françoise, and intends to return to Paris with her.  When the airport strike is over, Augier resumes his mission, but no sooner has the aeroplane taken off than it is hijacked.  Landing in the desert, Augier and Françoise find themselves prisoners of a band of ruthless Arabs, who will surely kill Bloch if they knew he was hiding in a suitcase on board the plane...

This run-of-the-mill comedy-thriller affords some memorable comic moments but will be most appreciated by fans of the super-sexy Mireille Darc.  A familiar face in Georges Lautner’s films, Michel Constantin gets a rare lead role, and works well along side the magnificent Jean-Pierre Marielle.  By far the most memorable sequence in the film is the one where Jean Lefebvre struggles with the huge suitcase of the film’s title; if the rest of the film had been as inventive and funny, La Valise would probably rank as a comic masterpiece.  As it is, Francis Veber’s script is occasionally amusing (and wondrously politically incorrect), but not up to the standard of some of the writer’s later work.

© James Travers 2005

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