Le Mouton à cinq pattes (1954)
Directed by Henri Verneuil

Film Review

One of the most successful and best of Fernandel's comedies is Le Mouton à cinq pattes, a humorous variation on the kind of anthology film that was highly popular in the '50s and '60s.  The film provides us with the most powerful argument so far devised against human cloning, by presenting us with not one but six versions of the famous horse-faced comedian.  This may sound like an immensely scary proposition for those who like their Fernandel in moderate doses but the comic's six incarnations are kept apart for most of the film (brought together only at the end in a remarkable split screen shot) and Fernandel does a very respectable job of delineating between the six characters he is asked to play.  It isn't quite Kind Hearts and Coronets, but Fernandel gives Alec Guinness a fair run for his money.

This was the sixth of eight features that Fernandel made with Henri Verneuil, who was one of the few film directors who consistently managed to get a top-notch performance out of the comic actor.  Verneuil's other successes with Fernandel include such classics as L'Ennemi public no 1 (1953) and La Vache et le prisonnier (1959).  Today Verneuil is probably better remembered for his slick thrillers of the 1970s - Le Clan des Siciliens (1969) and Peur sur la ville (1975) - although the merest glance at his filmography reveals that he was a director of exceptional versatility.  The film's lead actress, Françoise Arnoul, had previously starred opposite Fernandel in Le Fruit défendu (1952), also directed by Verneuil, and worked with the director on another three films, including Des gens sans importance (1955), one of his finest works.

For a mainstream French comedy of this era, Le Mouton à cinq pattes has a surprisingly distinguished cast, which includes such talented performers as Édouard Delmont, Andrex, Paulette Dubost and Noël Roquevert in supporting roles.  The biggest treat is Louis de Funès, appearing in one of the many petits rôles by which he earned his bread and butter before he hit the jackpot and became a mega-star of French cinema in the early 1960s.  Here, de Funès pretty well steals the show in the segment in which he plays a predatory funeral director, the kind of mean-spirited but amusing character that would become his signature role in later years.

After the amusing de Funès sketch, Fernandel monopolises virtually all of the remaining gags, and is at his most hilarious in The Fly sequence (in which he, in the guise of an old sea dog, must will a fly to land on a sugar lump so that he can win a bet).  The joke that gets the biggest laugh is held back to near the end, for the sketch in which Fernandel plays a country priest who is ridiculed for being the spitting image of Don Camillo - not surprisingly as the actor had played the character in two films in the last few years.   It isn't often that Fernandel gets to send himself up, but when he does, he does it magnificently.

Le Mouton à cinq pattes was not only an immense commercial success, attracting an audience of over four million in France, it was also almost universally praised by the critics (a rare occurrence for a Fernandel comedy) and was even nominated for an Oscar (in the Best Writing category).  The film also won the coveted Golden Leopard award at the 1954 Locarno International Film Festival, tying with four other films, one of which was Teinosuke Kinugasa's highly acclaimed Gate of Hell.  From all this we can only conclude that six Fernandels are definitely better than one.

Film Synopsis

Trézignan is a sleepy little town in the southeast of France.  Anxious to raise the profile of the town and draw in more visitors, the mayor decides to hold a celebratory fête in honour of a set of quintuplets who were born in the town exactly forty years ago.  The only problem is that the five identical sons had a violent falling out with their father, a bad tempered winegrower, and no one knows the present whereabouts of the famous Saint-Forget brothers.  It is a stroke of good fortune that Dr Bolène - the godfather to the quintuplets - should come across an article in a newspaper revealing that one of the sons, Alain, is now a successful beautician in Paris.

In the hope that Alain might know where his four brothers are, Dr Bolène wastes no time looking him up.  He is surprised at the very different paths the five sons have taken in their lives.  The second son, Bernard, is a journalist who now writes a column for a woman's magazine.  The third, Charles, is a priest who has come to resent his astonishing resemblance to Don Camillo.  The fourth, Désiré, earns a crust as a window cleaner, whilst the fifth, Étienne, appears to be the black sheep of the family, a seaman mixed up in some very shady business.  Dr Bolène has a hard time persuading this odd assortment of individuals to return to their home village - it seems they still haven't forgiven their father - but in the end he gets his way.  The féte does not go as smoothly as the mayor had hoped, however, and a shock is in store for one of the brothers when his discovers he is the father of sextuplets...