It’s called The Great Spy Chase in English, which captures the caper/shenanigans nature of this French film whose original title is Les Barbouzes. “Barbe” is the French word for beard (hence barber in English), which is what spies in ye olden times were supposed to hide behind, hence the French slang term for them – barbouzes.
That all cleared up here we are in 1964 two years on from James Bond’s first screen outing in Dr No and one year on from The Pink Panther, which is closer in spirit to this comedy of bumbling ineptitude about a French spy on a mission to return a dead arms dealer’s body to his beautiful grieving widow (Mireille Darc) and then find out where the dead man hid his nuclear secrets.
Four-square Lino Ventura stars as the French Secret Service’s top man, Francis Lagneau, who assumes the identity of a long-lost relative of the dead man to infiltrate his home. But he’s not alone. Three rival foreign spies in disguise are also on the case, hoping to beat Lagneau to the prize. But the semi-friendly, semi-hostile rivalry is interrrupted by the arrival of an American spy (Jess Hahn) who is prepared to outbid all his European opposite numbers.
A farcical comedy ensues. On one side old-school European spies, on the other the brash American interloper, sweaty, uncouth and in ill-fitting clothes. You can spot the cultural cringe from space but it does at least add some juice to the plot – the Europeans can’t close the deal with cash so they decided that wooing the widow is the way to achieve their goal. More shenanigans.
Les Barbouzes opens with a scene set on a train during which one spy after another meets a semi-comic grizzly end – one stabbed, one shot, one gassed, one out the door of the speeding train etc – and it continues in that mode all the way through. It’s one of those comedies where actions don’t really have consequences. If a man charges into a door at full tilt he doesn’t fall down unconscious, he blasts straight through it, because it’s a prop door and it’s made of balsa wood. There are many doors crashed through, and many unsurvivable situations, and even a running gag about the American spy being thrown through a window into the water-filled moat below.
Georges Lautner is the director, Michel Audiard the writer, Maurice Fellous the cinematographer, all three of them fresh from the success of the previous year’s Les Tontons Flingueur, which also featured Lino Ventura, as well as co-stars Bernard Blier, Francis Blanche and Charles Millot.
So it’s something of a family affair with the sense that everyone knows what they’re meant to be doing. It looks fantastic, thanks to Fellous’s superb cinematography – he even chucks in some tilting angles, gothic lighting and deep focus here and there – but in spite of Lautner’s zippy direction and committed playing by all concerned it’s a strangely flat affair with a one-damn-thing-after-another plot that might have passed muster in the first wave of spy spoofery after the success of James Bond but doesn’t look quite so fresh all these decades later.
That said, it is something of a cult item in France, doubtless on account of Michel Audiard’s screenplay, which meant little to this non-speaker of French but is meant to be brimming with wit and wordplay.
It’s one for fans of Ventura, who never seemed to put a foot wrong, whether it was in comedy or playing the out-and-out tough guy, but Mireille Darc is also impressive, as the bimbo with more going on upstairs than she’s letting on. And also one for fans of spy spoofs in general, a strange and often misfiring genre at its best when it sticks closest to its inspirational source. After all, James Bond is pretty much a spoof itself.
Les Barbouzes aka The Great Spy Chase – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2023
