Mein Onkel, der Gangster

It was one of the greatest french comedies.

Dialogs were from Michel AUDIARD, but you must listen them in French.

It's theses dialogs which have made the notoriety of this movie. Five great actors are these "Monsieur GANGSTER" (Lino Ventura, Francis Blanche, Robert Dalban, Bernard Blier and Jean Lefebvre).

The greatest scene is when these five gangsters are drinking alcohol in the kitchen.

It's one of the funniest movies I've seen. If you don't speak french, it's more difficult to understand dialogs because translation is often different that original language.

Forty year later, I love always this film "cult".

Excuse me for my poor English.

For a number of years now they have fed us movies about the adventures of mutant superheroes (o.k., I admit I have seen and enjoyed one or two of them). This was preceded by the surreal Schwarzenegger-Stallone-Van Damme-decade (also called the eighties), with action-flick actors whose muscle mass far exceeded their acting skills. Before that, there was Dirty Harry and a wild selection of anti-heroes of all sizes, shapes and colors. But when, exactly, was it, that real men disappeared from the screen? The event that caused the extinction of such dinosaurs as Lino Ventura, Jean Gabin, Lee Marvin, Humphrey Bogart and the like must have been the counter-culture of the sixties. But what a loss it caused. We had movie-stars who were real, gentlemanly (sometimes), cool, human and funny as well as ugly but sexy and we went and replaced them with a bunch of guys in a mask and cape (and I don't mean Zorro).

Luckily we all have our VCRs and DVD players and blockbuster and amazon and are able to enjoy movies like Les Tontons Flinguers, one of the funniest, coolest and yet silliest movies of all time. Every actor a character, every dialogue a gem, every scene a revelation about how to make it look easy. Go see this film before you even contemplate to watch Spiderman III!

This French film is a marvel for its dialogues, they are, unfortunately, and like most French comedies, completely untranslatable into another language. Not only is it humorous expressions, but in addition, a number of expressions are comical in their employment against, by transforming nouns into adjectives or the reverse, by the use of expressions that do not match social milieu of the characters through the use of games typically french words without equivalence in another language. Most situations can be understood only if we know the French life, so it is normal that this cinematic gem have only limited success outside the French public.

After the Killer Tomatoes we now have the Killer Uncles (a more or less literal translation of an untranslatable movie). The level of word-play may be guessed at even by non-French speakers when the credits announce it is based on the novel 'To grisbi or not grisbi', which is, in itself, a nod to another novel and classic French movie 'Touchez-pas aux grisbi', with 'grisbi' in both cases being underworld slang for 'loot' in the sense of 'hot' money. Although it has all the trappings of a 'gangster' entry this is actually a comedy of bad manners involving two factions led respectively by Lino Ventura and Bernard Blier. While ex-wrestler Ventura has no problem acting tough Blier, arguably the best actor in the piece by light years and equally at home across the acting spectrum, plays it for laffs so that what we wind up with is a melange. Another French classic. 8/10

Les Tontons flingueurs is a real master piece! Audiard was a genius writing in "green language" (la langue verte, slang from 50's/60's full of sharp metaphor) its really irresistible.... Unfortunately this movie cannot be translated, too bad it deserve at least 10 oscars! for acting / senario / directing / etc... JP nyc