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For forty years Fernandel, a.k.a. Fernand Joseph Désiré Contandin (1903–1971), was France’s top comic actor and an enormous and reliable box office draw, starring in over 130 features. When you look at French movie posters as often as I do, you see his caricatured long face and toothy grin popping up regularly—usually for films I have never heard of. But something about this beautiful grande for the 1951 comedy Boniface somnabule a.k.a. The Sleepwalker caught my eye. Maybe it’s the exquisitely rendered nightscape of Paris or those Paris rooftops which I remember fondly from having myself lived in a chambre de bonne garret for a year. Maybe it’s the details: that black cat with its arched back, or the tiny crowd of gawkers gathering in the bottom left of the poster, or the tactile folds of Fernandel’s voluminous green pajamas. Or maybe it’s...