Film Review
Following the success of their collaboration on
Monsieur Leguignon lampiste
(1952) and
Leguignon guérisseur
(1954), director Maurice Labro and actor Yves Deniaud joined forces on two
other comedies, this time in the
comédie policière line:
On déménage le colonel (1955) and
Le Colonel est
de la revue. The latter of these is one of Labro's weaker films,
one that starts out with a brilliant premise (society folk playing at gangsters)
but carelessly squanders it on a silly plot which ends up with a lot of pointless
running around. Compared with Labro's earlier comedies, which included
two very popular Fernandel vehicles,
L'Héroïque
Monsieur Boniface (1949) and
Boniface Somnambule (1951),
this one is pretty lightweight.
Daft and uneven as the film is, it does presage some of the classic entries
in the comedy-thriller genre that were to come, most notably Georges Lautner's
Les Tontons flingueurs
(1963) and
Ne nous fâchons
pas (1966). A leading radio star at the time, Yves Deniaud
received top billing but he is pretty well surplus to requirements, too easily
eclipsed by an unbeatable trio of comedy performers consisting of Dora Doll,
Jean Tissier and Armand Bernard, whose combined efforts salvage what would
almost certainly have been a dud without their presence. Deniaud had
enjoyed a successful career as a supporting artist since the late 1930s (debuting
in Marcel Carné's
Drôle
de drame) but he died not long after he achieved some measure of
stardom in the mid-1950s, at the age of 58.
Le Colonel est de la revue may not be a masterpiece but it does at
least provide a very useful lesson in social etiquette. 'Ah,
pas dans le poisson...' is of course the correct thing to say when someone
shoots dead the person sitting next to you at a dinner party during the second
course. Not long after this comedy misfire, Maurice Labro would go
on to direct one of his best and most popular films, the tense thriller
Le Fauve est lâché
(1959), which helped to cement Lino Ventura's reputation as the hard
man of French cinema.
© James Travers 2015
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.
Film Synopsis
Calla and his darling wife Cora are members of a society gathering that meets
up from time to time to play at being gangsters. Their dinner parties
rarely pass off without at least one guest being bumped off, although the
guests who are so afflicted inevitably come back to life before the evening
is over. For their amusement, the friends decide to stage a fake jewel
robbery, but the scheme goes horribly awry when the jeweller unwittingly
supplies real jewels and a gang of genuine hoodlums tries to get in on the
act...
© James Travers
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.