Que personne ne sorte (1962) - film review

A lonely widow Adélia is delighted when Jo, the charming man she met on holiday, turns up at her Bruges mansion one Christmas Eve.  She is less pleased when Jo’s five other friends and an attractive young woman appear a short while later, but she agrees to let them all stay in her home.  She does not realise that her guests are a band of notorious gangsters who have just kidnapped an ambassador’s daughter.  She is equally unaware that Inspecteur Wens has just been assigned to eliminate the six gangsters in the shortest possible time...

Stanislas-André Steeman’s detective hero Inspecteur Wens makes his final bow in this Franco-Belgium comedy-thriller, this time in the guise of Philippe Nicaud, playing the son of the original Inspecteur Wens of L’Assassin habite au 21 (1942) played by Pierre Fresnay.

The film is very different to Wens’ previous screen outings – a much lighter work with none of the film noir trappings of those early 1940s films. Que personne ne sorte is a very obvious attempt to parody the gangster films of the 1950s and is very typical of the comedy thrillers which became so popular in France in the early 1960s – Georges Lautner’s 1963 hit Les Tontons Flingeurs is another good example of this.  By accident or design, the film also has some pleasing similarities with the 1955 British classic comedy The Ladykillers .

The main thing to appreciate in this film is a memorable comic turn from the incomparable Jacqueline Maillan.  This doyenne of popular French comedy has a unique comic style where she renders the most dramatic scene hilariously funny, just by playing her part totally straight with a near-total oblivion to what is happening around her – rather like a myopic pigeon ambling blithely across a minefield.   Who better to play the part of an amiable widow playing host to a houseful of trigger-happy gangsters?

© James Travers 2002

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