Balduin, der Schrecken von St. Tropez

The cops are at it again. I guess retirement does not exist in France - just kidding of course. This is only true for movie cops, especially the ones that are in a movie series! And have Luis de Funes as a star! The fun thing is that kind of everyone is back from previous entries - nun is missing! No wait, she's not.

Having said all that the jokes are fine enough and you get your Funes mojo going. Not as straightforward and driven as the previous entry, but still fun and entertaining enough

This is a very entertaining outing about Marechal Ludovic Cruchot(Louis De Funes) along with his gendarmes group(Michael Galabru,Jean Lefebre,Guy Grosso,Michael Modo) are prematurely retired. Six months later,Cruchot retires into mansion her rich wife(Claude Gensac) where lives a boring life. But comes his pal Marechal(Michael Galabru) remembering old times. Cruchot has a museum of records and both remember their nostalgics adventures in the Gendarmerie Nationale, as they memorize images from'Gendarmes in N.Y, ' Gendarme get married' and 'Gendarme at St Tropez' when Lucien(Jean Lefebre) is obligated to nude himself for chasing nudists . When Lucien is interned in a clinic caused by lost memory, the group is reunited and then they go into action and impersonate again as gendarmes . The gendarmes outfit undergo several adventures,moving in disguise, dressing as hippies, smoking marijuana, and terminating into a hippie commune where everybody say: I love you.This time gendarmes aren't struggling with persistent nude swimmers but they protect them from parachuted gendarmes.Meantime they're pursued by real gendarmes and hid under a sheep flock. Besides the nuns who appeared previous episodes ask their help but five children have disappeared. Then the gendarmes wind up pursued by an atomic rocket.

This enjoyable French comedy upon the likable gendarmes packs crazy humor,lively situations amusement and too much fun. Louis De Funes, as always, stooges, grimaces and intense mocking faces . Highlights are the mimic gesticulation with a priest, and the conversation via whistle during a traffic jam. Again Claude Gensac,as Ludovic's spouse, she collaborated with Funes in numerous films, often playing his character's wife. Luminous local photography under St. Tropez's blue sky . Lively music score by Raymond Lefebre , includes the usual leitmotif , musical background in habitual ending parade.The picture is professionally directed and ingeniously written by customary director, Jean Girault.Another movies about Cruchot series are : ¨Gendarme of Saiz Tropez, Gendarme Get married, Gendarme and creatures of outer space and Gendarme and the Gendarmettes¨ , the last acting of the great Louis De Funes, an authentic farceur.

Now that Cruchot is married with Josepha,now that he is rich ,now that he has got nothing to do but rest in his missus's desirable mansion,what is left for him to do? Retirement is not his cup of tea and he feels nostalgic for the good old time when he was a gendarme and he had fun with his colleagues and his superior Gerber (Michel Galabru).

He finds back his old pals,and they come back to work,in an unofficial capacity.Their good humor will come back again too.

Of course Sister Marie-Benedicte (and mother superior)character is featured ,but Cruchot's daughter ,Nicole ,is absent for the first time in the series.She will never appear afterward.

The entire San Trope's gendarmerie is sent in an early retirement, to replace them with younger, stronger and more modern gendarmes. But Cruchot and his friends hardly endure the boredom of pensioner's life and soon get into a series of hilarious troubles. This fourth movie doesn't bring anything especially new into the franchise, but there are no bigger flaws either. A light comedy adventure for resting the brain.

6/10

This is an extremely uneven entry from the Gendarmes series, featuring Michel Galabru at a definitive peak (for the series) but De Funès alternating between brilliance and actual boredom (like what his character goes through at first in the film). Maybe this weariness my wife and I detected in his performance here was a foreboding of some of his health issues which will, a few years later, make him stop shooting physical comedy altogether, and will finally take his life so prematurely.

His faithful partner Claude Gensac wrote in her autobiography that De Funès' humour was a logical one. His characters were behaving logically even in their over-the-top reactions. But here when he goes nuts over being pampered and looked after all the time by his rich wife's staff, he insists upon dirtying the car on purpose in order to have a chance to wash it by himself and thus splashes paint all over it… only to empty in the process another bucket of paint on top of his own head… You would never have seen a gag like this in a classic Gendarmes such as "Le gendarme de St. Tropez" or "Le gendarme se marie", because it does not make sense! That the priest enters into a grimace contest with De Funès in plain view before his wife – however funny some of those face exchanges can be – doesn't make any sense either and is gratuitous! There is also mediocre acting on the part, for instance, of the butler, which doesn't help some of those poorly written, ill-warranted or directed scenes…

But when the Gendarmes don their uniforms under the orders of the hilariously perfect (i.e. constantly serious, grave and solemn) adjutant Gerber, we are OK gain, and the situations can get really funny, like the talking whistle bit which another reviewer has described so well!