Le Tigre se parfume à la dynamite (1965)

Le Tigre se parfume à la dynamite is a French thriller film first released in 1965, directed by Claude Chabrol.  The film stars Roger Hanin, Roger Dumas, Michel Bouquet and Margaret Lee.  It has also been released under the title: An Orchid for the Tiger.  Our overall rating for this film is: mediocre.


Secret agent Louis Rapière – code name “The Tiger” – is sent to French Guyana to supervise the recovery of a treasure from a sunken ship.  The operation is hi-jacked by a group of armed mercenaries who flee with the treasure after a bloody fight.  Rapière discovers that the treasure is now in the hands of a group of revolutionaries who intend to sell it to an international terrorist organisation, Orchid, using the money to buy arms they need to overturn the country’s government.  The authorities are prevented from intervening, through fear that this would provoke a national strike, and so it is left to Rapière to recover the treasure and thwart Orchid’s ambitions for global domination...

After the success of his first venture into the spy-thriller genre (Le Tigre aime la chair fraîche, 1964), Claude Chabrol was invited to make a follow-on film in the same vein.   That film was Le Tigre se parfume à la dynamite, a more obvious copy of the British James Bond films which were, at the time, proving to be enormously successful throughout the world.  Without the budget available to the Bond films, Chabrol was wise enough not to attempt a direct imitation of those films and instead veered more towards spy parody, similar to Georges Lautner’s Les Barbouzes (1964), which were equally popular at the time.

Admirers of Chabrol’s work – particularly his later films – will be surprised, if not appalled, by this film.   Typical of the mid-1960s spy thrillers, it has an unconvincing hero, a rambling plot which stumbles from one improbable situation to another, and is drawn out with a rather pointless series of overly choreographed fight scenes.  Although the film is now largely overlooked, and is seldom considered alongside Chabrol’s serious films, its success at the box office did allow Chabrol to win back the confidence of his producers, who were then more inclined to finance his subsequent films.

© James Travers 2003

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