Once a staple of the much-missed Art House circuit, this Marcel Carné/ Jacques Prévert pic has, unlike their classic CHILDREN OF PARADISE/’45, largely fallen thru the cracks. A shame as this comic outlier in their long collaboration now seems funnier than ever. A sui generis nutjob case, it’s a spoof of British murder mysteries (complete with those funny British names so loved by Victor Hugo), shot on teeny-tiny soundstages in front of papier-mâché sets, peopled with a very French, very eccentric cast. Louis Jouvet is a particular hoot as a severe Bishop campaigning against criminal author ‘Felix Chapel,’* who turns out to be his own cousin, botanist Michel Simon, writing under that pseudonym to earn the extra income he needs to support a wife and his hothouse mimosas. Meanwhile, handsome milkman Jean-Pierre Aumont is wooing the housemaid and secretly supplying most of the criminal stories Simon sells. And this situation might happily continue if only Françoise Rosay, Simon’s snobby wife, didn’t feel she had to hide from the disgrace of public disclosure by secretly leaving town only to be reported dead, murdered by her husband who now has to live disguised as M. Chapel until things get sorted out. And that might also work out if only there wasn’t another killer, a real one. That’d be the slightly mad young man claiming to be a butcher of butchers, and the current wooer of middle-aged Mme. Rosay, a very young Jean-Louis Barrault, showing a nude backside that easily tops the expressive limitations of his famous mime act in PARADISE. The pace skips beat now & then, but Carné knows when to cut to something silly to get a laugh (say, Aumont’s enormous oversupply of milk bottles) when he needs comic punctuation or a reset. It’s cleverly worked out, satisfying fun.
DOUBLE-BILL: *Could this Felix Chapel be any relation to ‘Ambrose Chapel’ in Hitchcock’s THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH/’34; ‘56)? Neither one quite what they seem.
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