Chaussette surprise (1978)
Directed by Jean-François Davy

Film Review

For most of the 1970s, director Jean-François Davy devoted himself to making pornographic films or documentaries related to the sex industry.  Of these the most successful and best known is Exhibition (1975), which attracted an audience in France of three million before the censors stepped in and plastered an X certificate on it.  Chaussette surprise marked a sudden and unexpected departure for Davy into the more censor-friendly realm of popular comedy.  With a stellar cast that includes two divas of the French New Wave - Bernadette Lafont (La Maman et la putain) and Anna Karina (Une femme est une femme, Alphaville) - it is among Davy's most exuberant and entertaining films, even if, for the most part, it is shamelessly silly.

Davy wrote the screenplay in collaboration with the more experienced writer Jean-Claude Carrière, who is renowned for his many collaborations with director Luis Buñuel (which included Le Charme discret de la bourgeoisie (1972)).  Chaussette surprise is as unlikely a film for Carrière as it is for Davy, and it can't help looking like a naughty send up of the chaotic lowbrow comedies that were rife in French cinema in the late 1970s.  Michel Galabru, playing a man more obsessed with the well-being of his television set than his own state of health, is honoured with the best visual gag - trapped inside his precious television set in his pyjamas, and Bernadette Lafont does a good job selling the quiz show concept that would later be recycled as Qui Veut Gagner Des Millions? (a.k.a. Who Wants to be A Millionaire?).

Meanwhile, Claude Piéplu is hilarious as the doctor with a pathological dislike for people who injure themselves in car accidents and Bernard Le Coq's zany inventions provide a constant stream of weird visual gags.  Marcel Dalio puts in a cameo appearance, right at the end of his illustrious screen career, and whenever Christine Pascal turns up she looks as if she is in a completely different (and slightly superior) film.  Chaussette surprise dips its toe into the feminist whirlpool of the late 70s and, had more thought gone into the script, it might have made an effective satire.  Instead, the writers and cast are too busy having fun for this to be anything more than just another silly comedy from the decade that taste forgot.

Film Synopsis

After a road accident, Bernard, Raphael and Antoine end up sharing the same hospital ward.  As they create pandemonium from their hospital beds (helped by Raphael's compulsive habit of inventing useless gadgets), their wives make the most of their newfound freedom.  One of the wives, Bernadette, ends up on a television quiz show and stands to win fifty million francs...