Film Review
Many years before he became a world famous cinema icon through his Monsieur
Hulot films, Jacques Tati made his screen debut in a number of short films
in the 1930s in which he put his talent for visual comedy to good use.
Of these, the best known is
Soigne ton gauche, a 12-minute long boxing
skit which owes something to Buster Keaton's
Battling Butler (1926) and Laurel
and Hardy's
The Battle of
the Century (1927). The film was one of the first and most
atypical films to be directed by René Clément, who would go
on to to have an extraordinarily high profile career from the mid-1940s,
winning accolades and attracting massive cinema audiences with such films
as
La Bataille du rail
(1946),
Le Père tranquille
(1946),
Jeux interdits (1952)
and
Plein soleil (1960).
Jacques Tati not only takes the lead role in
Soigne ton gauche, he
also supplied the script, and in both areas he gives us a tantalising foretaste
of his subsequent comedy triumphs -
Jour
de fête (1949),
Les Vacances de monsieur
Hulot (1953) and
Mon oncle
(1958). At the time, Tati was a popular stage comedian, with a particular
flair for mime and mimicry. The film features one of his most successful
pre-WWII stage routines, that of the boxing fanatic taking on an imaginary
(or possibly invisible) opponent.
This may not be vintage Tati, but
Soigne ton gauche features some
side-splitting sequences which makes it a hugely entertaining and memorable
short film. You wonder why Tati took so long to make a name for himself
in cinema, when he shows such obvious talent for slapstick and has such an
engaging screen persona (the comparison with Keaton is a fair one).
The film's closing scene, with the comical country postman cycling off into
the distance, seems to presage Tati's first notable work as a director,
L'École des facteurs,
made a decade later.
© James Travers 2002
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.
Next René Clément film:
La Bataille du rail (1946)
Film Synopsis
On a farm somewhere in rural France, a sports coach is training two boxers
for a forthcoming match when disaster strikes. One of his boxers is
knocked out during a training bout and, to continue training the coach needs
to find a replacement - fast. He notices a young farmhand, an obvious
boxing enthusiast, miming a boxing match by himself in a barn, and persuades
him to enter the makeshift boxing ring. With only his enthusiasm and
a teach-yourself book to help him, the farmhand throws everything he has into
the phoney boxing match. With a little help from the village postman
and his cronies, our hero pulls off a spectacular victory, only to land
an unexpected blow from his mother...
© James Travers
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.