Les Gorilles (1964) - film review

Édouard and Félix, two former bodyguards, end up working as baggage handlers at Orly Airport.  When a diamond merchant loses one of his suitcases at the airport, the two friends set out to recover it, convinced that it has been mistakenly picked up by another air traveller and must contain a fortune in jewels.  Their hunt takes them all over Paris, and doesn’t quite end as they might have hoped...

Les Gorilles is one of those tedious run-around comedies which, whilst popular with mainstream French cinema audiences in the 1960s, now comes across as painfully trite and unamusing.  Darry Cowl’s idea of comedy takes some getting used to (exactly which planet does he hail from?) but Francis Blanche is irresistibly funny and provides the film with the comedy muscle it needs to sustain it through its lethargic ninety minute crawl, which consists mainly of the kind of comedy situations that make Benny Hill’s comedy efforts look hyper-sophisticated.  Amidst all the dross there are one or two amusing digressions (including some inspired sight gags), but alas this is not enough to make anyone want to fritter away an hour and a half of his life on this soft-boiled dollop of low burlesque.

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