Le Mur de l’Atlantique (1970) - film review

In 1944, Léon Duchemin , a restaurant owner living in Normandy, leads a peaceful life.  His restaurant is frequented by German officers, black marketers and members of the French Resistance, but his clients’ exploits hold no interest for him at all.  That is until an English airman falls out of the sky and lands in his daughter’s bed.   From that day, his life takes an unexpected turn and he ends up as an unwitting agent of the Resistance…

After the staggering success of the 1966 film La Grande Vadrouille, the production team of Le Mur de l’Atlantique were clearly hoping to repeat the success with the winning formula of Bourvil and an outlandish comic farce set at the time of the Nazi occupation.  Unfortunately, despite some memorable comic moments, this film is little more than a pale imitation of that earlier film.  Needless to say the film was nowhere near as successful at the box office.

On a sad note, this was the very last project on which the great comic actor Bourvil worked.  Very ill when he was making the film, he died a short while after completing the shooting.  That fact alone casts a veil of sadness over the film and the comedy somehow feels strangely inappropriate.

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