Les Vieux de la vieille (1960) - film review

Baptiste Talou, a former railway worker, decides to live out his declining years in a home for the elderly.  Before that, he returns home to recover some money he left in the house of his friend, the farmer Blaise Poulossière.  Blaise is sitting at the local café with another friend, Jean-Marie Pejat, who sells bicycles.  After a few drinks, the three men become trouble-causers of the first order, and so everyone in the village is glad to see the back of them.  A quiet retirement does not suit the three friends, however, so they agree to move back to the village, much to everyone’s annoyance...
© Willems Henri (Brussels, Belgium)

This classic French comedy brings together three much-loved stalwarts of French cinema – Pierre Fresnay, Jean Gabin and Noël-Noël, each playing an anarchic oldster who is determined to grow old as disgracefully as possible.  Think of it as Last of the Summer Wine meets St Trinians.   Popular French screenwriter Michel Audiard turns in another juicy gag-laden script which the triumvirate of veteran stars bring to life with a manic juvenile relish, of the kind that is seldom seen outside a frenzied South American revolution.

The film was directed by Gilles Grangier, who was particularly known for this kind of light-hearted comedy.  Although Grangier was generally well thought of and had many box office hits, he did, in later years, have a tendency to give his leading actors too much free rein, often to the detriment of the film.  Here, Grangier is amply justified in standing back and letting his fired up trio of stars do their thing, each risking a fatal coronary in the process.  Gabin and Fresnay are not particularly known for playing O.T.T. vaudevillian roles but in this film both are hilarious as troublesome geriatrics living out their second childhood, terrorising an idyllic rural community as they do so.    

The main raison d’être of Les Vieux de la vieille is obviously to entertain, which it does admirably.  However, it also prompts us to reflect on how society treats the elderly, an issue that is as relevant to day as it was when the film was first seen.  In particular, the sequences in the old people’s home are as poignant as they are funny.  As the camera slowly pans along a succession of docile old men seated tidily on a row of benches, their final port of call resembles more a Fascist-run prisoner-of-war camp than a happy retirement home – a sad fate for those who had fought for their country and survived the horrors of the trenches.  How cheered we are when Gabin and company escape this grim outcome and happily resume their campaign of terror in their home village.

© James Travers 2010

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