Lemmy pour les dames (1962) - film review

Pursued by autograph hunters at every turn, the world’s most famous FBI agent, Lemmy Caution, soon regrets taking a holiday on the French Riviera.  The holiday is soon over when a strange Italian woman is murdered shortly after soliciting help from Caution.  The redoubtable FBI agent confronts the dead woman’s three female fiends, each of whom is married to a powerful politician or industrialist.  It transpires that someone has been blackmailing the four women in order to extort state secrets.  But who, and for what motive?

The ever-resourceful Lemmy Caution returns for yet another testosterone-surge outing, charming pretty ladies and punching nasty men, just like they used to do in those halcyon days of B-movie mediocrity.  The plot is the same unimaginative fodder that followers of the Lemmy Caution series would by this stage have become inured to; it is indeed hard to comprehend exactly why the series once had such a mass appeal to French cinema audiences.  At least the whodunit element adds a modicum of suspense and some of the scattergun comedy helps to relieve the monotony of the slow-paced plot.

After nearly a decade on the big screen, Lemmy Caution has clearly entered the self-parody phase which inevitably hits secret agents in late middle-age (look what happened to poor 007 after Sean Connery handed in his PK99).  Indeed, from the film’s first five minutes you might be forgiven for thinking its writers had gone mad and opted for an out-and out farce instead of the usual B-movie pastiche (although this might have made a better film…).

Despite having played Lemmy Caution for nearly ten years Eddy Constantine shows no sign of tiring of the part he has made his own.  Oozing charm by the bucket load, Constantine’s iconic, and slightly camp, portrayal of the world’s most unflappable secret agent is a delicious (but hardly subtle) piece of parody.


© James Travers 2004

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