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Summary
After several failed suicide attempts, the depressive young millionaire Arthur Lempereur
agrees to go on a tour of the Far East with his valet Léon, his fiancée
and her parents. Learning that he is bankrupt, Arthur decides to hang himself, but
is talked out of it by his accountant Mr Goh, who makes him a deal. Arthur's death
will be assured if he agrees to sign an insurance contract, in which a million dollars
will be paid to his fiancée and to Mr Goh, if he dies within the next month.
When unknown strangers start taking pot shots at him, Arthur soon regains his enthusiasm
for life. He and Léon embark on a desperate mission to try to find Mr Goh
to persuade him to annul the contract...
Review
After the spectacular success of L’Homme de Rio, Philippe de Broca was commissioned
to direct a similar frenetic action comedy, again with Jean-Paul Belmondo in the lead
role. De Broca freely adapted a novel by Jules Verne to create a film in the same
vein as L’Homme de Rio, but with a bigger budget and with far more liberal use
of comic stunts.
Les Tribulations d'un chinois en Chine is an indefatigable action farce from start
to finish, seemingly exploding with some genuinely breathtaking stunts set against some
equally breathtaking scenery. Filmed in such exotic locations as Hong Kong, Kuala
Lumpar, Bombay and the jungles of Malaysia, you get the impression that no expense was
spared (and it wasn’t). This is big budget comic book comedy à la Stephen
Spielberg (who himself was allegedly influenced by de Broca’s films), a uniquely Broca-esque
melange of James Bond and Tintin. This time, de Broca even manages to hire a real-life
Bond girl to partner his lead actor, the stunning Ursula Andress, more than justifying
the inclusion of a shameless Bond parody at the end of the film.
There is nothing at all which is remotely profound or believable in this film. It
is an unashamed comic diversion, pure escapism, in which increasingly O.T.T. comic situations
falling thick and fast and stunt actors (which include Belmondo) seemingly engage in a
battle to the death to out-do each other. For the viewer, it is an exhausting but
thoroughly entertaining romp, although you may feel that you are sitting through a video
recording of Around the World in Eighty Days with the play control stuck on "fast-forward".
© James Travers 2000
Essay Sometimes one has to step back to appreciate just
what exists of value in a filmmaker or a film that one has been quick to disparage. I
have been slamming Philippe de Broca for years on so many fronts it's hard to keep track.
He's commercial. His films are trivial entertainments. They are arch and strained. They
go on too long for the slight things that they are. I believe all of this still. In the
1960s found his antiwar fable King of Hearts (Le roi de coeur, 1966), which
had a deliriously long run at some Boston movie house, silly. Horrors, I thought: de Broca's
"getting serious."
De Broca is still at work. The onetime assistant to Claude Chabrol and François
Truffaut is near seventy now, his career having settled into work for French television.
It's time to be kind, at least, kinder. He made "trivial entertainments"? Well, yes, and
because he could be good at making them some of them are rousingly, if trivially, entertaining.
Les tribulations d'un Chinois en Chine (The Tribulations of a Chinaman in China
; Up to His Ears) suffers from all the shortcomings that afflict all of de
Broca's films. It's also, if one is in a receptive mood, funny and exciting. And it has
Jean-Paul Belmondo in his agile, endearing stunt-performing mode.
The film is based on the novel by Jules Verne. Indeed, it's the very best cinematic Jules
Verne apart from Karel Zeman's brilliant Czech film Vynález zházy (1958),
which draws from a number of Verne's novels, principally, Face au drapeau. Without
doubt, whatever its shortcomings so typical of de Broca, Les tribulations d'un Chinois
en Chine is vastly superior, for example, to Michael Anderson's flatfooted Around
the World in 80 Days (1956), the star-studded monstrosity for which producer Mike
Todd won an Oscar. (The year of John Ford's The Searchers, mind you, which wasn't
nominated.) The requisite line-treading between impossibility and possibility is exhilaratingly
within de Broca's grasp; you won't find this in Around the World. De Broca's may
not be the best film on the block, then, but there are others that are far worse.
De Broca and Belmondo had already teamed for Cartouche (1962) and L'homme de
Rio (1964; the more mythical title The Man from Rio became in the States the
sarcastic That Man from Rio), thus establishing the forte of their partnership
as action-comedy. (Subsequently the two reteamed for Le Magnifique (1973), L'Incorrigible
(1975) and Amazone (1990).) Indeed, Les tribulations is very much in
the same vein as L'homme de Rio, if a bit more frantically and farcically so; Belmondo's
character there, Adrien, asks rhetorically of his girlfriend, "What's next? Are we going
to China?" Les tribulations takes de Broca and his star to China--to Hong Kong, to be
exact--for a series of breathless adventures that keep Belmondo's character, Arthur this
time, constantly fleeing a seemingly ubiquitous conspiracy to have him killed. (It's worth
noting that Steven Spielberg's 1981 Raiders of the Lost Ark generously plagiarizes
from both these de Broca-Belmondos, but substituting, disadvantageously, production-finish
for their lightness of touch.)
The premise is nothing if not farfetched. Living on a boat, Arthur Lempereur is a bored
billionaire whose attempts at suicide always fail. In Hong Kong, his Chinese attorney,
Mr. Goh (Valéry Inkijinoff, impeccable), helps secure the boy a few-day insurance
policy that upon his death will bring to each of his two beneficiaries, his fiancée
and Mr. Goh himself, a fortune. Since nothing would be paid on the policy in the event
of suicide, Arthur agrees that Mr. Goh should arrange for his murder, to come as a surprise
when the boy is least expecting it. But, anxious in the extreme, Arthur is now always
expecting it and, besides, the fan dancer whose act he has caught, Alexandrine, has given
him new cause to live. Arthur wants out of the death-arrangement, therefore, but Mr. Goh
seems intent on getting his share of the fortune. Two suspicious men dogging Arthur turn
out to be (inept) bodyguards paid by the insurance company to protect their most vulnerable
client, but meanwhile the boy's fiancée's greedy parents are hiring people left
and right to score a hit against him.
The lightness, the speed, the dazzling stunts and special effects, the brilliant sense
of an endless chase all contribute to the spirit of the thing, and while one may get a
bit tired before the film reaches its merry conclusion--I know I did--a good deal of the
transport delights. The film's trump, of course, is Belmondo. I know, I know: Belmondo
is one of the greatest actors of all time, in films by Louis Malle, Jean-Luc Godard and
Jean-Pierre Melville, among others. I'd much rather be watching him in one of those. Nevertheless,
breezy commercial entertainments were the bread-and-butter of his career, and he is truly
astonishing in this role, for both his comic skill and that limber athletic body of his.
The former boxer delivers an expert series of farcical jabs and amazing leaps and tumbles.
Ursula Andress plays Alexandrine, appearing in what Dr. No (Terence Young, 1963)
had made her trademark bikini. In the 1980s, seemingly nearing extinction, Andress became
something of an industry joke for taking up with a "boy-toy," a young, dreadful actor
named Harry Hamlin. (Hamlin ended up on American TV, in L.A. Law, having found a niche
hospitable to his smarmy incompetence.) To see Andress young again, and gorgeous, as she
is in Les tribulations d'un Chinois en Chine, is to redeem one's memory of her
from the sad pathos of her later attempt to recapture her simple magic in the arms of
Rosemary's baby.
© Dennis Grunes 2003
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