Drôle de drame

Of the seven films written by Jacques Prevert and directed by Marcel Carne I have now seen five - and I have the published screenplay of 'Jenny' their initial collaboration and now the only one I have yet to see. This is the kind of film that brings out the hybridologist in reviewers, the Marx Brothers Meet Mel Brooks type of Screamers and it has to be said that the film does lend itself to that type of journo's trick. Of course any film written by Prevert and directed by Carne is going to be worth seeing whatever the story and whoever the cast. In terms of cast this is a doozy; Michel Simon, Francoise Rosay, Louis Jouvet, Jean-Louis Barrault, Jean-Pierre Aumont, on the surface the cream of French cinema between the wars, but if we stop and look again we realize that what we have here is a series of disparate acting styles so the logical question is what type of story can possibly accommodate this bizarre melange. Answer: Precisely the sort of story Prevert has supplied in which a group of top French actors are transplanted to Edwardian London and given names like Archibald Soper, Irwin Molyneux, William Kramps and, wait for it, Billy, The Milkman. Do we really need a plot after this? Well, in case the answer is yes how about a hypocritical bishop (Jouvet) who gets his kicks denouncing detective fiction (this was in its heyday in 1937, when the film was made, but hardly causing much of a stir in Edwardian England) whilst his cousin (Simon) leads a double life as a timid gardener who moonlights as a best-selling author of detective fiction. When Soper invites himself to lunch at his cousin's London home, the lady of the house (Francoise Rosay) having antagonised the staff to the point of their departure, prepares the meal herself and then, on grounds of rampant snobbery, absents herself for the duration. From this seemingly innocuous move Soper convinces himself that Molyneux has murdered his wife and the scene is set for things to spin in ever widening circles. Still a huge hit in France and shown regularly on TV it has never, to my knowledge, played in England. Seeing it for the first time in 2004 I was completely captivated and drawn into its spiralling plot. 9/10

In the Victorian London, the botanist Irwin Molyneux (Michel Simon) and his wife Margaret Molyneux (Françoise Rosay) are bankrupted but still keeping the appearance due to the successful crime novels written by Irwin under the pseudonym of Felix Chapel. Their cook has just left the family, when Irwin's snoopy and hypocrite cousin Archibald Soper (Louis Jouvet) that is in campaign against the police stories of Felix Chapel invites himself to have dinner in Irwin's house. Margaret decides to keep the farce of their social position secretly cooking the dinner, while the clumsy Irwin justifies her absence telling the bishop Soper that she had just traveled to the country to meet some friends. However Soper suspects of Irwin and calls the Scotland Yard, assuming that his cousin had poisoned his wife. Irwin and Margaret decide to hide the truth to avoid an exposition of their financial situation, moving to a low-budget hotel in the Chinese neighborhood, getting into trouble.

"Drôle de Drame ou L'Étrange Aventure de Docteur Molyneux" is a hilarious theatrical comedy of farce and mistakes. Most of the characters are hypocrite, greedy, lazy or simply incompetent and the situations they get involved are silly, naive but very funny. In spite of having irrelevant flaws in the plot, this film is a great entertainment. My vote is eight.

Title (Brazil): "Família Exótica" ("Exotic Family")

A huge international hit in the 30s, I suspect this seems a bit too labored and artificial now to quite captivate a modern audience the way, say, Children of Paradise still does. But the fan of 30s cinema (Marx Brothers and Carole Lombard division) will find lots to like in the collision of disparate styles-- screwball motivations (Barrault plays a besotted madman worthy of Mischa Auer) and Feydeau-farce complications (I won't spoil the delightful way in which Simon, having absconded from home and suspected of a nonexistent murder, is immediately forced to return to his house in disguise); a supposed proper Englishness (the mania for detective tales and the orderly reality beneath them) seen through thoroughly French eyes (which means that mad Gallic passion roils just below the surface). And if you know French cinema, the cast is its own reward-- stern Jouvet, as an increasingly irrational and surreal-acting clergyman, versus shambling Simon (reportedly they hated each other, in any case the clash of styles is perfect), Rosay (of Carnival in Flanders), the handsome Aumont and, most surprisingly, Barrault in an energetically black- comic role 180 degrees from his winsome mime in Children of Paradise. (Note on availability: So far as I know there's no good version of this on tape in the US but there is a very good subtitled French DVD, region 2 only of course.)

Spoofs are generally not popular with the masses (except when Crosby/Hope or Abbott/Costello or Woody Allen are doing the spoofing) so it's no surprise to discover there exist few box-office viable spoofs of film noir. (I know people will claim Alexander Mackendrick's 1955 The Ladykillers, but this is actually a marvelous spoof of crime caper movies. Otto Heller's photographic style not only shines brightly into every nook and cranny, but the story always goes for the belly laugh rather than the jugular vein). A notable exception is the Marcel Carné 1937 Drole de Drame, in which one of the finest casts ever assembled – Jouvet, Simon, Rosay, Barrault, Aumont, and the lovely Nadine Vogel (who made only four movies, of which this is her debut) wrestle with a delightfully ridiculous plot that manages to get wilder and wilder as it progresses from pugnacious snobbery through blatant hypocrisy to the most ridiculous cop shop misinvestigation ever presented on a big-budget theatre screen. Schuftann's atmospheric, noir photography and Trauner's nightmarishly sprawling sets rival any similar creations from Berlin or Hollywood. The movie is chock full of bizarre touches, but the one that tickled me best was the sleeping journo, most amusingly played by Henri Guisol (who enjoyed quite a career in French who-dun-its and noir).

I haven't read the other user comments but whoever did the summary for this film possibly hasn't seen it! It has absolutely nothing to do with a serial killer of women (the killer in question kills butchers because they kill animals) and Soper accuses his cousin Molyneux of having poisoned his (Molyneux's) wife. The whole thing is an absurdist's delight -- a French film set in a London that never was.