Peau de banane

Adapted from a Charles Williams' novel, this French comedy is the most famous film from Marcel Ophuls, a later documentary movie maker, and one of earliest Jean Paul Belmondo's success, the same year of L'HOMME DE RIO. The novelist Charles Williams was a specialist of boat or ship intrigues, schemes taking place aboard boats - nothing to do with this film - and also a specialist of complicated crook, swindle topics. It is usually not a too gloomy, dark atmosphere in those books, just a bit from time to time. This one is one of the most faithful adaptation and notorious from Chuck Williams' work. It is excellent, on the condition you can follow the details of this story and the actors play. I could not make it with the book, and hardly bear the film. But don't misunderstand me, it is quite an enjoyable French film.

I really like Jean-Paul Belmondo, very much, but not in this movie, it's boring and has no point of attraction. In vain, there are still some very good actors, such as Jeanne Moreau, Alain Cuny, Gert Fröbe, Jean-Pierre Marielle, Claude Brasseur, the story is fad, salt-free and pepper-free. Marcel Ophüls, the director, does not really have the 7th art in his pocket. He would have done better to deal with something else. "Banana Peel" is neither comedy, nor adventure, nor suspense, it's just a waste of time.

Peau de banane is only watchable thanks to its top-notch cast, but they cannot make it unforgettable. There is simply no rhythm in the plot, stuff happens and there never is a consistent effort to come up with a real twist so it is all boringly linear.

The worst is that with this cast you hope something will eventually happen, so you seat the whole movie through and unfortunately this only helps to prove it is entirely devoid of imagination, snappy situations or even finely chiselled characters.

I would say crook comedy is basically an easy genre just like heist movies, yet you have to really try to make it interesting. It cannot be the story of a sting only with minor bumps. I can't even think of one great scene - let alone a brilliant one. So this movie fully deserves to have fallen into oblivion: it is a real time-waster.

I hope that another version of this film eventually makes it to DVD, as the existing DVD is an abomination! Although the film was co-written and directed by Marcel Ophüls and stars Jeanne Moreau and Jean-Paul Belmondo (all indicating it's a quality production), the film is undone in two major ways. First, the film is dubbed into English and there is no original French version with subtitles. As a film purist, I hate that. I also fond it strange when French actors were dubbed. When they spoke with Germans in the film, suddenly they had a strong German accent. When they spoke with people in French, they didn't have a trace of the French or German accent! Second, the DVD appears to have been made from a poor videotape! It's grainy and blurry throughout. Don't you think that these problems should clearly be spelled out on the DVD case so you don't get tricked into buying a film like this? Fortunately for me, I rented it from Netflix and am thrilled I didn't spend money to buy this! Overall, the film was somewhat enjoyable but I just lost interest--mostly because the entire thing looked so sloppy. Again, most of this was really the fault of the DVD copy--not the original film. Perhaps if they ever release this in the US I'll try watching it.