La cage aux folles II

I love this movie, the scenery, the music etc... But old foreign movie critic friend of mine back in the early '80s suggested to me that Michel playing the haggard Italian lady was a salute to Ana Magnani. I've seena few movies of her. And Michel really did a great job.

I'm from Avellino Italy and I came over in 1956. So. In our Italian American villages we didn't have running water so we had to pump the drinking water and have rain barrels around our houses to save it for washing clothes. It was great for your hair too.

My Italian grandmother and mother would act like him when they were toiling with their chores.

Although some have said they like this sequel better than part one, this follow-up to C.A.F. is a little more forced than the first one. Albin does plenty of high pitched shrieks to keep us chuckling and involved, but this story isn't as solid as the first. As long as you keep your expectations in check, you'll have fun. The story starts at the nightclub, but there are mixups and shenanigans in hotel rooms, and running around France. With the good guys and the bad guys both chasing after them, they go into hiding at Renato's family home in Italy. The in-laws, the Deputy of the Moral Committee is in this one briefly, and Jacob the over-emotional maid, but not the son. It's also not the safe, happy-go-lucky world of the nightclub that we saw in Part 1. In this one, there are plenty of gags and jokes, but also a fair amount of hateful name calling and street fighting that we didn't see in part 1. There's also a subplot of Luigi the farm hand falling for one of them, but you'll have to watch it for yourself.

Gay couple Albin (Michael Serrault) and Renato (Ugo Tognazzi) get involved with the police and gangsters when Albin gets some stolen microfilm. They flee to Italy and try to hide out.

This isn't as good as the original (which was ground breaking) but it's a hundred times better than part 3 (which was dreadful). The plot is silly but when Albin and Renato are on screen who cares? The two actors are great in their roles. There's plenty of funny sequences especially when all the policemen dress up in drag! So it's worth seeing but don't expect it to be as good as the original. BTW--ignore the R rating. It's PG-13 all the way.

"La Cage Aux Folles II" is not as good as the first part. It does score some points for not being a carbon copy of the original: it does try out some new things, like the classic espionage MacGuffin of the microfilm that various secret agencies are after, or a trip to Italy in seek of refuge. Ugo Tognazzi is still the perfect straight man (so to speak....), and Michel Serrault is possibly even better this time - he develops the character further, giving him a touch of melancholy. But the film is too sluggish and sprawling - it definitely feels longer than it is (99 minutes). Still worth seeing but not a "must". **1/2 out of 4.

When this film was released on VHS worldwide, the voices had been dubbed in English; since then, I've only found subtitled in English versions. That said, the dubbed version, for those of us not fluent in French, was absolutely excellent--hats off to the producers of such an entertaining film. We find our "heroes" all embroiled in all kinds of shenanigans, but mainly: they're in trouble with the Mob. Terrifically funny and clever, it backs off the social statement that La Cage I went to great pains to present. Cage II seems to have set social significance aside, for the most part, and then panders to the "funny bone" to get laughs, albeit good ones. Both I and II were (are) trailblazers in the gay movement around the world (well, perhaps not so much in Uganda, Nigeria, or Kenya or in some Mid-Eastern countries, alas). Cage III is something else.