Le Couturier de ces dames (1956) - film review

Modest Parisian tailor Fernand Vignard dreams of managing his own fashion house – for women.  His dreams comes true when a former mistress dies and leaves him her maison de haute couture in her will.  Although the company is on the verge of bankruptcy, Fernand readily gives up his humdrum tailor’s job to take the reins of what he hopes will become the most exclusive fashion house in Paris.  Fearing a spat with his jealous wife Adrienne, Fernand tries to keep all this from her.  Unfortunately, the cat soon manages to find a way out of the bag – and the fur starts to fly…

The incomparable – and still enormously popular – Fernandel finally finds his match in the form of Suzy Delair in this low-brow but hugely entertaining farce.  A popular actor and singer in the 1940s, Suzy Delair has a screen presence that equals that of Fernandel, and it is indeed a rare treat to see two such equally matched comic performers laying into each other with the vigour and sense of fun that we see in Le Couturier de ces dames.  A run-of-the-mill storyline that replays all the old jokes about marital infidelity is really just a vehicle for the Delair-Fernandel comic double act which, despite its predictability, still has great entertainment value.

The film was directed by Jean Boyer, who made some of the most popular French film comedies of the 1940s and 1950s, often working with some of the biggest names in French cinema at the time.   Prior to Le Couturier de ces dames, Boyer had directed Fernandel in a similar film, Coiffeur pour dames (1952), and the two would collaborate on another six films.

Among the most memorable sequences in Le Couturier de ces dames is the scene in which Suzy Delair gate crashes a fashion show and ends up stripping down to some very sexy frilly underwear – with surprising panache.  In a parallel Universe, this film most probably became a long-running sitcom.   Sadly, in ours, this was to be the one and only edition of the “Fernandel-Delair Show”.

© James Travers 2005

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