Le Mouton à cinq pattes (1954)

Le Mouton à cinq pattes is a French film comedy first released in 1954, directed by Henri Verneuil.  The film stars Fernandel, Françoise Arnoul, Andrex, Édouard Delmont and Georges Chamarat.  It has also been released under the title: The Sheep Has Five Legs.  Our overall rating for this film is: very good.


The mayor of Trézignan, a small town in the south of France, plans to revive his little community by holding a fête to commemorate a very special event - the fortieth anniversary of the birth of a set of quintuplets.  There is just one snag, however.  The five identical sons left the area twenty years ago, having fallen out with their father - the irascible viticulturist Edouard Saint-Forget - and no one knows their present whereabouts.  By chance, the quintuplets’ godfather, Dr Bolène, comes across a newspaper article which reveals that one of the sons, Alain, has become a famous Parisian beautician.  With no time to lose, Dr Bolène sets out to find Alain and, through him, discover the location of the other four sons, Bernard, Charles, Désiré and Etienne.  But even if he can find them, will Dr Bolène be able to persuade them to return to their home village...?

One of the most successful and best of Fernandel’s comedies is Le Mouton à cinq pattes, a humorous variation on the kind of anthology film that was highly popular in the ’50s and ’60s.  The film provides us with the most powerful argument so far devised against human cloning, by presenting us with not one but six versions of the famous horse-faced comedian.  This may sound like an immensely scary proposition for those who like their Fernandel in moderate doses but the comic’s six incarnations are kept apart for most of the film (brought together only at the end in a remarkable split screen shot) and Fernandel does a very respectable job of delineating between the six characters he is asked to play.  It isn’t quite Kind Hearts and Coronets, but Fernandel gives Alec Guinness a fair run for his money.

This was the sixth of eight features that Fernandel made with Henri Verneuil, who was one of the few film directors who consistently managed to get a top-notch performance out of the comic actor.  Verneuil’s other successes with Fernandel include such classics as L’Ennemi public no 1 (1953) and La Vache et le prisonnier (1959).  Today Verneuil is probably better remembered for his slick thrillers of the 1970s - Le Clan des Siciliens (1969) and Peur sur la ville (1975) - although the merest glance at his filmography reveals that he was a director of exceptional versatility.  The film’s lead actress, Françoise Arnoul, had previously starred opposite Fernandel in Le Fruit défendu (1952), also directed by Verneuil, and worked with the director on another three films, including Des gens sans importance (1955), one of his finest works.

For a mainstream French comedy of this era, Le Mouton à cinq pattes has a surprisingly distinguished cast, which includes such talented performers as Édouard Delmont, Andrex, Paulette Dubost and Noël Roquevert in supporting roles.  The biggest treat is Louis de Funès, appearing in one of the many petits rôles by which he earned his bread and butter before he hit the jackpot and became a mega-star of French cinema in the early 1960s.  Here, de Funès pretty well steals the show in the segment in which he plays a predatory funeral director, the kind of mean-spirited but amusing character that would become his signature role in later years.  

After the amusing de Funès sketch, Fernandel monopolises virtually all of the remaining gags, and is at his most hilarious in The Fly sequence (in which he, in the guise of an old sea dog, must will a fly to land on a sugar lump so that he can win a bet).  The joke that gets the biggest laugh is held back to near the end, for the sketch in which Fernandel plays a country priest who is ridiculed for being the spitting image of Don Camillo - not surprisingly as the actor had played the character in two films in the last few years.   It isn’t often that Fernandel gets to send himself up, but when he does, he does it magnificently.

Le Mouton à cinq pattes was not only an immense commercial success, attracting an audience of over four million in France, it was also almost universally praised by the critics (a rare occurrence for a Fernandel comedy) and was even nominated for an Oscar (in the Best Writing category).  The film also won the coveted Golden Leopard award at the 1954 Locarno International Film Festival, tying with four other films, one of which was Teinosuke Kinugasa’s highly acclaimed Gate of Hell.  From all this we can only conclude that six Fernandels are definitely better than one.

© James Travers 2011

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