Jaloux comme un tigre

Peculiar man spies jealously on beautiful wife. That's the plot, enough to power a five-minute Benny Hill sketch, but this is it for the rest of the film.

Darry Cowl was a well-known musician-comedian. He wrote the script in a month, motivated by the need to recoup gambling debts, and he fills the film with his actor friends, who are clearly friends indeed. Obviously the real-life Cowl had more charm than Henri.

So anyway Henri's wife Sophie (Cowl's soon-to-be real life wife Rolande Kalis) is capable and bored. Their domestic bliss is expressed rather touchingly in their pancake-tossing games. But he will not let her have a job as he observes her attracting all the men around her. However she gets a job for his boss. He tries to get her sacked. He smears oil on the boss's face, plays a tennis game in which he serves a variety of objects other than the ball, puts on a variety of costumes, etc.

Dani Saval does a spirited turn. She appears to be madder than Cowl. I'm afraid I lost track of why she is there.

The film continues at screwball pace with visual jokes, surreal behaviour and quirky music. I guess if you keep watching it's because it's hit and miss and the odd idea might tickle your imagination.

Five minutes of highlights is about right. Sophie's attempts to play the tuba would be right in there (her whackiness is funnier because she looks like the sensible one, there's a lesson there). Maybe the flashback of them getting married. Maybe the scene about buying the cheapest ring. Their attempts to get him down from the tree. Denise Provence as Mme Lurot at the end. There you go, seven or eight minutes.

Saw this on a poor quality ultra low-res YouTube version 9/15/15. I patiently sat through barely watchable electron soup for eighty minutes as M. Cowl and his colleagues, some very distinguished (Michel Serrault, for example), obviously try to be funny and just as obviously do not succeed.

The movie consists of a series of bits involving a man who believes his wife is unfaithful and who tries to do something about it. The cast takes numerous uncomedic stabs at making silly faces, standing on their heads, running around. Perhaps more undercranking in places would have helped. Benny Hill did this sort of thing so much better and consistently so.

There is something about comedy of the going-for-laughs variety that results in failure if the actors seem to be working for those laughs. To me this was sometimes a problem with Jerry Lewis or the Ritz Brothers. Darry Cowl and the cast here try way too hard to be funny. The result is, well, trying.

Then there is the music. The hoped-for riotous farce presented by Cowl and Co. arrives on screen with underlining provided by one of the more irritating music tracks in the long history of bad movie music, consisting of a poorly recorded Hammond (or similar) organ playing little "funny" riffs. The effect was similar to watching a Jack LaLanne home exercise television show from the 50's...except LaLanne's exercise music was more competently composed and appropriate.

Did the title in any way justify the content of the movie? Let's just say "Jaloux Comme un Tigre" is not exactly up to Bunuel's "El!" (1951). Even the film's wafer-thin premise gets in the way of its mindless procession of disconnected segments, consisting of a tennis match, a soiree allowing Cowl to don a number of "funny" disguises, and an unhilarious session at a deliberately mislabeled photography studio, to name but a few.

I wish I could offer further details on the story, but after eighteen hours it has been a heavy lift remembering just those leaden vignettes.

The only other thing I remember is not having laughed at anything in this movie.

The only interest of this movie is the presence of Darry Cowl and some of the most famous comic French actors. Darry Cowl could have been a great comic shooting his own movie, but here gags are so lousy and repetitive that this movie is immediately forgotten, so disappointing. Another French comedy "franchouillarde" (French popular). For Darry Cowl hardcore fans only.