La comédie du bonheur

"La Comédie du Bonheur" (comedy of happiness) was made at a time when France was no more happy (1940),so the title might have seemed a bit ironical.Unless the mad man,who escaped from an insane asylum ,wanted to cheer up his compatriots (here the lodgers of a boarding house ).

A lunatic (Michel Simon) wants the lodgers of the house to be happy:so he hires a few actors who play on stage a musical version of "Quo Vadis" !My theater,he tells them has no stage left or stage right,my theater is life .But if the thespians act as if they're in a play ,they are anyway.They will fall in love and soon discover they don't play anymore ,they live.

This film,ambitious but not always successful (there are many subplots and the viewer may often get lost),which verges on the fantasy genre ,paved a reliable way for L'Herbier's war days peak "la Nuit Fantastique" ,where he directed Micheline Presle again,and one can only deplore he did not use again the handsome Louis Jourdan,the Alain Delon of that era,instead of aging Fernand Gravey.

This was a modern work (L'herbier's talkies were either ahead of their time :" le Bonheur" "La Nuit Fantastique" "LE Mystere De La Chambre Jaune" or -more often -old-fashioned stuff ,the likes of "Entente Cordiale" "La Porte Du Large" Les Hommes Nouveaux").Here,abetted by Jean Cocteau's lines , mardi gras costumes and the carnaval of Nice,he did what he had to do: making French people forget that their comedy was,to quote Jacques Tourneur ," a comedy of terrors".

What an amazing list of people (Cocteau, Ibert, Ramon Novarro, Micheline Presle...Eve Francis)and if the film is not one of the peaks in their careers it's not a failure either.

This romp with a radio background fields it's stunner cast in glossy white décors. I particularly like the inventor of edible phonograph disks whose pistachio is his big hit.