Bernard Blier

Manèges

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Robert, in shadow, with Dora

Manège is the French word for a riding school. One features centrally in Manèges (aka The Cheat), a superbly unpleasant French movie from 1949. It’s also the word for merry-go-round – worth remembering as this tale about a cuckold being given the absolute runaround plays out. The casting is bang-on perfect. Bernard Blier as Robert, the pudgy, middle-aged owner of a riding school who has married vampish Dora (Simone Signoret) because she’s hot as hell, unaware that Dora’s mother (Jane Marken) has engineered the marriage for reasons of her own. The story plays out in flashback, from the hospital where Dora lies mortally injured after a terrible accident. While Robert twists his knuckles … Read more

Les Barbouzes

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The spies assembled

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 … Read more

Les Tontons Flingueurs aka Crooks in Clover

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Lino Ventura as Fernand

There’s something about 1963’s Les Tontons Flingueurs as a title that sounds wackier, funnier, just better than the usual English translation – Crooks in Clover. The film also goes by the name Monsieur Gangster but the original French literally translates as Gunslinging Uncles. Tontons Flingueurs is better because it sounds a bit ridiculous, and that’s really what’s going on in this amusing French drama from 1963, often described as a comedy but only properly funny if you speak French. Michel Audiard’s screenplays deal heavily in slang and wordplay and neither of those quite survive the translation into English. The film has a real cachet in France; elsewhere barely any. If like me you’re … Read more

Quai des Orfèvres

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Jenny Lamour and the inspector

“Quai des Orfèvres” means “the cops” in France in the same way that “Scotland Yard” does in the UK. So it’s no surprise that this classic from 1947 is a crime thriller. It’s a peculiarly knotty one, directed by the masterly Henri-Georges Clouzot, who also did the adaptation, from Stanislas-André Steeman’s original novel Légitime Défense. Clouzot did not have the novel in front of him as he worked, and had not read it for years, but he took Steeman’s basic idea and fleshed it out using his own characters, getting all sorts of plot details “wrong” as he worked. The result appalled Steeman, who discovered that Clouzot and writing collaborator Jean Ferry had … Read more