À pied, à cheval et en spoutnik! (1958)
Directed by Jean Dréville

Film Review

These days, when a film does well at the box office a sequel or spin-off is more or less guaranteed.  This is by no means a new phenomenon, as À pied, à cheval et en spoutnik grimly testifies.  The film was a hastily concocted comedy that was clearly intended to capitalise on the enormous success of Maurice Delbez's À pied, à cheval et en voiture (1957), with iconic comic actor Noël-Noël reprising his role as mild-mannered everyman Léon Martin.  At the time, the biggest news story of the day was the launching of the space dog Laika into orbit by the Soviets, aboard Sputnik 2.  It was an era when the sci-fi dream of space travel was looking like a real possibility, and what could be funnier and more current than sending Noël-Noël into space with a dog and a mouse?

À pied, à cheval et en spoutnik has some strong concepts behind it but these appear to have been thrown - almost as a casual afterthought - into a silly and aimless comedy that plods its weary way over familiar territory.  It isn't until near the end of the film that Noël-Noël and his dog finally get inside a Sputnik, and what happens then is hardly a surprise.  Before this mild flirtation with hardcore sci-fi, the spectator has to sit through a dreary comedy that feels like the slowest countdown to a rocket launch that the human mind can conceive.  There's practically no logic to anything that happens in this film - it is just a succession of vaguely related comedy situations lazily thrown together by a team of writers who had no clear idea what the film was meant to be about.

The film is significant in that it was the final collaboration between director Noël-Noël and Jean Dréville, a respectable director who only occasionally let himself down with idiotic non-starters such as this.  It was on the hugely popular La Cage aux rossignols (1945) that Jean Dréville and Noël-Noël first worked together, followed not long after by the widely acclaimed Les Casse-pieds (1948) and one segment in the anthology film Retour à la vie (1949).

Mediocre comedy though it is, À pied, à cheval et en spoutnik manages to distinguish itself with the quality of its special effects, which are among some of the best to grace any French film of this decade.  The model shots are on a par with those seen in bigger budget American sci-fi movies of the 1950s, and the weightlessness scenes inside the Sputnik are convincingly realised with Kirby wires, allowing Noël-Noël to perform some surprising gymnastics without the illusion being broken for a second.

Viewed today, one of the more fantastic aspects of the film is how sympathetically it portrays the Soviet Union - not as a Cold War adversary feared and loathed by the West, but as a modern, friendly, forward-thinking nation ready to link up with the rest of the world.  Here we have a taste of that brief period of optimism in the mid-to-late 1950s, the so-called Khrushchev Thaw, when relations between the West and the Soviet Union took on a distinctly pally hue after the demise of Stalin.  It's hard to know what went wrong but Noël-Noël joyriding in a Sputnik probably had little to do with it, even if he did steal Yuri Gagarin's thunder by three years!

Film Synopsis

After a car accident which has left him with a partial memory loss, Léon Martin takes up residence with his wife Marguerite in a house in the country to recuperate.  One day, Léon is met by a dog which he is convinced is his own, the exact same animal that went missing two years previously.  In fact, the dog is a test animal in a Soviet space mission and has just landed by parachute not far from Léon's house.  Understandably, the Soviets want their dog back, but Léon has no intention of parting with the animal.  Once an agreement to return the dog is reached, Léon is invited to Moscow as a guest of honour.  He even gets the opportunity to see the inside of a Sputnik just before it is due to blast off for its next mission.  What happens next is entirely predictable...