Le Club des soupirants (1941)
Directed by Maurice Gleize

Film Review

Le Club des soupirants was the first of three films that the comedy giant Fernandel made for the German-run Continental Films when France was under Nazi Occupation during the Second World War. Having starred in this somewhat shambolic comedy (which is generally considered one of his worst films, for all its forced cheeriness), Fernandel agreed to feature in two more films for Continental, on condition that he directed them - these were Adrien (1943) and Simplet (1944). This was not the comic actor's finest hour, and of the thirty or so films made by Continental, these three are amongst the most forgettable. Even diehard fans of Fernandel will struggle to find anything positive to say about Le Club des soupirants - it is a Grade A disaster on pretty well every front.

How such a dismal piece of populist 'entertainment' came to be scripted by Marcel Aymé, one of France's most revered writers of the period, is anyone's guess. (This wasn't Fernandel's only association with Aymé - ten years on he would star in Henri Verneuil's fair adaptation of the writer's 1929 novel La Table aux crevés.)  Certainly, Aymé received plenty of criticism after the Liberation for lending his services to the Vichy régime. It wasn't sufficient that the writer managed to script one of the worst films of the Occupation - he did so for a company created by Nazi Germany for the express purpose of suppressing French nationalism!  André Cayatte also had a hand in the screenplay - hard to believe given the high regard he is now held in on the strength of the judicially themed dramas he subsequently wrote and directed. Whilst it is true that Le Club des soupirants is clumsily strewn with Pétainist sentiment and goes out of its way to extol the virtues that the openly Fascistic Vichy government were so keen to foist on the French population, what makes it so unbearable is that it is such an ineptly made film.

It's hard to name a single film featuring Fernandel that is as mirthless, as plodding and as aimless as this gruelling comedy misfire. To make up for the almost total absence of scripted gags, Saturnin Fabre and Max Dearly, two supremely talented comedy performers, are reduced to pulling faces and generally acting like dying circus clowns forced to perform in front of a firing squad. Fernandel doesn't even try to be funny - he just plays his usual, drearily chirpy himself, occasionally breaking into song and doing a reasonable impression of a lobotomised chipmunk, clearly unperturbed by the web of mindless drivel he has managed to get himself wrapped up in. As for the film's director Maurice Gleize... well, the best that we can say is that he surpasses himself - totally. In the field of human endeavour, never has so much effort been squandered by so many to achieve so pitifully little. Of the many humiliations the Nazis imposed on the French nation, Le Club des soupirants is quite possibly the least forgivable.

Film Synopsis

In a last-ditch attempt to save themselves from financial ruin a consortium of investors agree to form a club with the intention that one of them will secure a huge dowry by marrying the daughter of a fantastically wealthy banker, Cabarrus. Prince Nirvanoff, a once renowned Don Juan, now somewhat gone to seed, is hired to coach the aspiring suitors and ensure that at least one of them is successful. Enter Antoine Valoisir, a naive young man who somehow gets himself enrolled in the club having strayed onto Cabarrus's sprawling country estate whilst out hunting butterflies. What Antoine lacks in good looks he more than makes up for in charm, and he turns out to be the man most likely to walk off with the Cabarrus dowry. Unfortunately it is not the banker's daughter Daisy he is interested in, but his equally attractive niece Édith...