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Long before The Lavender Hill Mob, the propagator of "British cultural depravity" viewed by zany continental neighbors. Edwardian London via Joinville Studios, cobblestone streets and tea party hats and all, "quelle maison!" The timorous botanist (Michel Simon) dotes on mimosas and leads a double life, secretly he's the pulp writer against whom his cousin the vicar (Louis Jouvet) proselytizes. "Detective novel readers are future murderers," reads the banner above the pulpit, and sure enough there's the dainty killer (Jean-Louis Barrault) in the congregation, so sensitive to animals that he's taken to dismembering butchers. At home it's a matter of snobbery, the author's wife (Françoise Rosay) would rather hide in the kitchen than admit to a lack of servants, from there on it's a case for the Scotland Yard. "A force d'écrire des choses horribles..." A little divertissement from Marcel Carné and Jacques Prévert in a fine balmy mood, the fog of poetic despair rolls in soon after. The nonexistent crime is the eye of the screwball storm—passersby become accomplices and culprits become drinking buddies, the corpse in the closet is very much alive. "No imagination" is the artist's trouble, he gets his plots from the lovestruck milkman (Jean-Pierre Aumont) hiding in the attic with the maid (Nadine Vogel). (His bottles will have their role to play in The Trouble with Harry.) This ode to bloodthirsty English coziness has a French postcard in it, Simon and Jouvet purring over roasted duck and blinking at cutlery might be Charles Laughton and Clive Brook. Fake beards and fickle inheritances, the dreaming reporter and the Patroclus nude in the greenhouse pond, "to each his own methods." So it goes with gags gathered like filched lapel posies into a lambent bouquet, thank heavens in the end for "strange acquaintances." With Pierre Alcover, Henri Guisol, and Jeanne Lory. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |