Si j'étais le patron (1934)
Directed by Richard Pottier

Film Review

By the time he came to direct Si j'étais le patron, the first film he helmed under the name Richard Pottier, the Austrian-born Ernst Deutsch was already a fairly experienced filmmaker.  In the late 1920s, Deutsch started out as an assistant in the big German film studios (working with Josef von Sternberg on The Blue Angel) before he began directing French versions of multiple-language films in France.  Deutsch's experience is at once apparent in the first few films he directed under his assumed name - Si j'étais le patron, Un oiseau rare and Fanfare d'amour, all of which are lively comedies that are among the sharpest and wittiest made in France in the mid-1930s.  Over the next few decades, Pottier directed a string of mainstream hits that included stylish crime movies - Huit hommes dans un château (1942), Les Caves du Majestic (1945) - and popular musicals - Destins (1946), Violettes impériales (1952).

Few would doubt that Richard Pottier had the common touch.  His first film could hardly have failed to strike a chord with a Depression-weary audience eagerly anticipating the socialist revolution that would augur in the Age of the Worker.  Si j'étais le patron is not just a film of its time, it is actually spookily prescient.  It's astonishing how strongly it evokes the mood in 1936 when the Popular Front government came to power in France and set itself the task of building the kind of workers' Utopia that most ordinary French people had set their hearts on.  Is this film merely presenting what was inevitable, or did it actually play a part in getting the Front Populaire elected?  You can't help wondering...

As a piece of social satire, Si j'étais le patron is pretty crude - cruder even than René Clair's À nous la liberté (1931), a film that has a similar anti-capitalist, pro-individualist agenda.  The none-too-subtle leftwing slant can readily be attributed to the film's dialogist Jacques Prévert (not long before he began his fruitful collaboration with director Marcel Carné).  A founder member of the Communist theatre troupe The October Group, Prévert brought his left-leaning politics into many of the films he worked on around this time, most notably Jean Renoir's Le Crime de Monsieur Lange.  Without his thoughtful input, Pottier's film would doubtless have ended up as little more than a flimsy farce.  Its political resonance is what make it so interesting and involving. 

Looking every inch the heroic symbol of the French proletariat (before Jean Gabin came along and claimed that crown for himself) is the film's charismatic lead actor, Fernand Gravey.  Without his trademark moustache, Gravey is virtually unrecognisable and looks frighteningly like a Paul Muni clone, not the grand séducteur of later years, but the perfect embodiment of working class frustration and resentment, whose oft repeated phrase gives the film its title:  'If I were the boss...'   Gravey's likeably morose hero is all too easy to sympathise with - particularly as his bosses are no more than an anonymous consortium of stiff suits and hats that do nothing other than draw an unjustifiably large salary and make bad decisions that are driving their company to ruin.  Plus ça change...

If the workers are played sympathetically - and these include Mireille Balin's morally impeccable secretary and Pierre Larquey's irrepressibly jovial factory worker - the bosses and shareholders are represented far less kindly - as money-grubbing numskulls whose lack of business acumen and all-round ineptitude are surpassed only by their lack of feeling for their fellow man.  Only one of these ugly handmaidens of rampant capitalism has so much as a scrap of humanity, and even he seems to be acting out of self-interest - the devious Monsieur Maubert, played with delightful comic élan by Max Dearly.

It is the Janvier-Maubert rapprochement (a Faustian pact sealed with a champagne binge) that ultimately saves the blighted factory from ruin - this is clearly modelled on the kind of arrangement between labour and capital that France's leftwing parties strove to bring about in the mid-1930s.  Si j'étais le patron  is unashamedly a political film but, unlike several other French films of this era, it doesn't overstate its case.  It is, after all, supposed to be a mainstream entertainment intended to cheer up a depressed nation, not a propaganda piece for the Communist Party.  Yet, by stressing the need for a mutually advantageous partnership between workers and bosses, the film was perfectly attuned to the Zeitgeist of the moment.  Eighty years, it feels surprisingly topical, although the happy ending is fanciful beyond belief.  But, to do it credit, the film did predict the silent motor car - and the dangers this poses to unwary pedestrians...

Film Synopsis

Henri Janvier may be a mere production line worker in an automobile factory but he has big ambitions.  He has invented a silencer for motor vehicles that, he is sure, will one day make him a wealthy man.  Sadly, he hasn't yet found anyone who takes him seriously - until the day he is summoned to his boss's office.  Henri's confidence that his talent is at last about to be recognised proves to be misplaced.  Fearing that he might be an agitator, his boss has decided to sack him before he can make matters worse for the factory, which is already facing financial ruin.  Before he gets wind of his dismissal, Henri organises a fête for his colleagues, and it is here that he runs into Monsieur Maubert, the majority share holder in the factory.

Completely oblivious to Maubert's identity and the hold he has over his boss, Henri pours out his troubles to him.  Maubert takes a liking to the headstrong young man and decides to take him at his word when he claims he can save the failing factory.  Without delay, Maubert exerts his shareholder influence so that Henri can become the firm's managing director for a day.  Henri wastes no time using his newfound authority to make changes that will improve the factory's profitability, much to the chagrin of his former employers who resent having to take a pay cut.  Maubert's gamble looks as if it may pay off when a rich American shows up and offers to buy Henri's invention for a small fortune...