If you haven’t heard of The Brain (Le Cerveau), then you’ve missed the biggest box office hit in France in 1969 and a film that the New York Times described as “one of the freshest, fastest, nimblest and funniest comedies to hit town… in a long, long time.”
I’ll just quickly add that the Times is overselling, massively, and that for a good long chunk of it, until it gets into the home straight in fact, The Brain is very unfunny, mostly unthrilling and largely unglamorous. But once it does it miraculously shifts gear, or maybe by that point I’d just given up and yielded to it.
The vibe is The Pink Panther or The Italian Job, caper comedy stuff with famous faces. And like The Pink Panther it features David Niven among a lot of continental Europeans (or pretending to be).
It’s a twin-track heist-movie plot. Up in the gods, Niven’s British Army officer Colonel Matthews, a supervillain so smart he is known as “the Brain”. Down in the sump a pair of petty thieves, Arthur and Anatole, played by Jean-Paul Belmondo and Bourvil. The Brain is plotting to heist a massive amount of Nato money being transported by train. And so, unbeknown to the Colonel, are Arthur and Anatole.
Until we get to the actual heist, which is both ridiculous and cute, there is a lot of comedy shenanigans to endure, as if writer/director Gérard Oury had just typed “shenanigans” into a 1960s comedy algorithm and let it do the rest.
Niven is imperious and fastidious and funny, Belmondo salty and sexy and charming, while Bourvil (real name André Raimbourg) is a farceur of the old school, adept at double takes, pratfalls, comedy running and all that stuff.
Joining them, and the surprise of the film, is Eli Wallach as Frankie Scannapieco, an Italian gangster who is over-protective of his young sister, Sofia (Silvia Monti), a young woman desperate to lose her virginity and certain that the Colonel can help her mislay it. Wallach is probably best known as one of the three desperadoes in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, but it turns out he’s great at slapstick as well as looking mean and dirty.
Scannapieco will eventually become the fly in the ointment of both heist attempts, but that’s all in the future. Until then it’s a case of beautiful people, beautiful locations, 1960s Paris with barely any traffic in it, sexy young women in their scanties and a running joke about the Colonel having such a massive cerebellum that its weight causes his head to drop to one side when he’s really exerting himself.
Really it’s the prototype for almost every film Guy Ritchie has ever made, and like Ritchie’s best films it actually starts to motor the more leaves it throws into the wind machine, as plot twist follows twist, and the characters all get involved in each other’s business, the police of two countries thrown in for good measure. Eventually Oury goes all in, chucking in a kitchen sink in the shape of a gigantic scale model of the Statue of Liberty, the French liner the France and a troupe of drum majorettes, who all meet for a wackadoodle quayside finale in Le Havre.
Like I say, eventually you admire its refusal to quit, and its insistence that just one more character and one more plot turn – an accidental firework display perhaps, or villains pretending to be cops hitching a ride with the police – will turn base metal into gold. And it does, that’s the amazing thing about it. The unendurable has as if by magic become the zanily attractive.
But let’s not get too carried away.
The Brain (aka Le Cerveau) – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2024
