Film Review
Even before
Le Gendarme de
Saint-Tropez was released to popular acclaim in 1964, its director
Jean Girault and lead actor Louis de Funès were envisioning a sequel.
No one - least of all de Funès - could have foreseen just how big
a hit the first
Gendarme film was going to be. With an audience
of 7.4 million, the film established de Funès as the most popular
comic actor of his generation (after having already appeared in over a hundred
films). The following year, he would star in the three most commercially
successful French films of the year -
Le
Corniaud (11.7 million),
Le Gendarme à New York (5.5
million) and
Fantômas se
déchaîne (4.2 million).
With a much bigger budget (brought about by the international success of
the preceding film),
Le Gendarme à New York benefited from
a costly location shoot on the other side of the Atlantic - a rare phenomenon
for a mainstream French film of this period. Of the many difficulties
this presented the production team with the most significant was Jean Lefèvre's
inability to take part in the location sequences set in New York City - this
explains why the actor is absent from much of the film, to the great distress
of his many fans.
Apparently unfazed by his sudden rise to stardom, Louis de Funès turns
in another of his tour de force comic performances, delivering non-stop hilarity
as the irascible police-chief for whom nothing ever seems to go right.
By now, he has developed a magnificent rapport with his co-star, Michel Galabru,
who gets nearly as much comedy mileage from his role as the even more prone-to-tantrums
Adjutant Gerber. De Funès and Galabru made a such an effective
double act in the first two
Gendarme films, sparring off each other
like a pair of rabid wild cats, that they were bound to keep coming back
for more - one of the main factors in the on-going success of this film series.
Less smartly written than the first
Gendarme film, this more ambitious
sequel suffers somewhat from a distinct lack of plot and a surfeit of pointless
running around. Jean Girault's direction is even less inspired than
usual (although not quite as bad as on the trash he turned out in later years),
although with an actor of de Funès's calibre taking centre stage -
and doing so with such unwavering comic brilliance - just about any second
rate director would have sufficed. More entertaining than the subsequent
entries in the
Gendarme series,
this second offering of police mayhem has one triumphant sequence - a marvellously
choreographed (and utterly side-splitting) parody of West Side Story.
© James Travers 2019
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.
Next Jean Girault film:
Les Grandes vacances (1967)
Film Synopsis
With an international police conference due to take place in New York, the
police brigade of St-Tropez is given the honour of attending the event as
France's representative. Chef Ludovic Cruchot, his adjutant Gerbier,
and their band of ever-resourceful gendarmes set off by steam boat, blissfully
unaware that Cruchot's daughter, Nicole, has smuggled herself aboard.
Our uniformed heroes take advantage of the long ocean crossing to improve
their English. They intend to make a good impression upon their arrival
in the New World.
Arriving in New York, the gendarmes are immediately confronted with cultural
and language barriers that seem to be insuperable, even to men of their undoubted
abilities. Fougasse promptly falls ill and is whisked away to hospital,
whilst Cruchot, imagining that he is seeing his daughter, is driven to consult
a psychiatrist. To gain admittance to America, Nicole passes herself
off as a penniless orphan intent on finding a better life in the Land of
the Free. By chance, she runs into a journalist who, moved by her plight,
manages to turn her into a national celebrity...
© James Travers
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.