Le Mur de l'Atlantique (1970)
Directed by Marcel Camus

Film Review

After the staggering success of the 1966 film La Grande Vadrouille, the production team of Le Mur de l'Atlantique were clearly hoping to repeat the success with the winning formula of Bourvil and an outlandish comic farce set at the time of the Nazi occupation.  Unfortunately, despite some memorable comic moments, this film is little more than a pale imitation of that earlier film.  Needless to say the film was nowhere near as successful at the box office.

On a sad note, this was the very last project on which the great comic actor Bourvil worked.  Very ill when he was making the film, he died a short while after completing the shooting.  That fact alone casts a veil of sadness over the film and the comedy somehow feels strangely inappropriate.

Film Synopsis

In 1943, Léon Duchemin is leading a peaceful life in Nazi occupied France.  Twenty years after his wife walked out on him, he now lives in a small Normandy town with his sister Marie and daughter Juliette, and together they run a restaurant that is popular with German officers and black marketeers, as well as members of the French Resistance.  Léon has no intention of getting himself mixed up in the war and wants only to lead a quiet life, an ambition that is cruelly thwarted when an English officer named Jeff falls out of the sky one day and crashes onto his daughter's bed.  Léon has no choice but to offer the unwelcome officer a place in his humble abode, and Jeff wastes no time trying to get on intimate terms with Juliette.

Through a series of chance events, Léon then manages to get his hands on a set of plans of the German fortifications on the Atlantic Wall, together with details of a top secret new weapon.  Jeff realises at once the importance of these documents and persuades the restaurant owner that they must be delivered to the Allies as quickly as possible.  After an eventful trip to England, Léon is parachuted back into France, and discovers that his daughter now has a baby - and it's not too hard to work out who the father is.  Meanwhile, Jeff is busy making his contribution to a plot to assassinate Field Marshal Rommel when he visits the town in a few days' time.  With the helped of a stuffed antelope, Léon succeeds in thwarting the assassination attempt and is soon on his way back to England - just before the Allied invasion gets under way...