Un chapeau de paille d'Italie (1944)
Directed by Maurice Cammage

Film Review

The ever popular French comedy legend Fernandel throws just about everything he has into this spirited adaptation of Eugène Labiche's 1851 play Un chapeau de paille d'Italie, aided and abetted by a cast that looks like a job lot from Marcel Pagnol's Marseille film studio.  Pagnol regulars Charpin, Andrex and Édouard Delmont lend Fernandel their support as he gallops through this brisk comedy, leaving a trail of mayhem in his wake.  Whilst it is nowhere near as classy as René Clair's more sophisticated 1928 version of the same play, this is an enjoyable romp which is elevated above the mundane by the few unexpected surreal digressions it takes along the way.
 
The crazily speeded up wedding procession feels like a sly homage to the slow motion funeral march in Clair's Entr'acte (1924), as does the slow-mo sequence in which a valet is thrown unceremoniously from an upstairs window.  The proceedings stall when Fernandel is called upon to exercise his vocal chords with two pretty nondescript musical numbers, but once these obligatory songs have been dispensed with things soon pick up with another rapid round of comic hi-jinks.  The best scene by far is the one in which Fernandel ends up at the mercy of a slightly psychopathic dentist, played by Charpin at his scariest and funniest.

Un chapeau de paille d'Italie was one of the career highpoints of director Maurice Cammage, who had a prolific career in the 1930s turning out popular lowbrow comedies, many with a military theme and as often as not featuring the horse-faced comedian - Ordonnance malgré lui (1932), Le Coq du régiment (1933), Les Bleus de la marine (1934), Les Cinq Sous de Lavarède (1939).  Cammage may not have been a great innovator but he knew how to get the best out of his leading man, and it is partly though his films - mostly good-natured burlesques - that Fernandel became the foremost comic actor of his day.

Film Synopsis

On the morning of his wedding to the beautiful Hélène, Fadinard goes for a ride in his horse and cart.  Disaster strikes unexpectedly when his horse devours a straw hat belonging to a young married woman named Anaïs Beaupertuis, who is out for a stroll with a male friend.  Afraid of what her jealous husband will think, Madame Beaupertuis insists that Fadinard finds her a replacement hat.  A day that began so peacefully and with such promise soon becomes a nightmare as the unfortunate bridegroom struggles in vain to find that elusive hat...