Assassins et voleurs

Another proof positive that the French cinema was not moribund in the late fifties and that it did not need any savior ! This is the work of a young man who was 71 and who was younger than yesterday.

"Assassins Et Voleurs" is another gem from the old wave ,with an extraordinary screenplay which could be described ,for someone who do not know Sacha Guitry ,as "Billy Wilder in an insane asylum"!Yes ,it's that much good! Opening sequence :a man is sitting at his desk and you expect the director himself as it was often the case in the past;but it's not !It's Jean Poiret who teams up with his then-collaborator Michel Serrault (like Martin and Lewis, they began as a team,Poiret Et Serrault before going their own way and working both with Claude Chabrol in the eighties).But Guitry's fans know that Poiret plays Guitry himself;"Assassins Et Voleurs " is primarily a settlement of scores :Guitry had never forgotten the way he was treated in the Liberation days .What a coincidence! the scene of the trial follows the scenes in which the hero is confined to a "convalescent home" (actually an insane asylum) ,and the only witness (Darry Cowl in a five-minute tour De force) mistakes the courtroom for a stage or for ...anything but a courtroom.

The first part explodes all the clichés of the Theatre De Boulevard: a man pretends he saves a woman who pretends she's drowning;this person is a former schoolmate's wife ,the secondary school bully who treated him as his punching bag !to become his erstwhile persecutor's wife's lover,what a sweet revenge! But the two lovers do not try to hide cause fear is part of the game ,and they carry on openly in public in the cafés ,or in a department store (32 beds to make love!),or in an empty car in a railway station at night (but they are disturbed because the railroad men need to hitch the carriage up to a train leaving ).

The second part surpasses ,if it is possible the first one:a shaggy -dog story .In the mental hospital ,a guy who lost all his dough playing chess ,goes on playing with bottles,glasses and lumps of sugar as the king,the queen or the bishop;a couple,man and wife ,are both insane ;but the husband thinks he's sane and she's crazy and vice versa .We learn to steal a diamond with Plasticine (it may be of some use),without guns and violence (as Serrault tells us at the beginning:if the victims were more sensible,we wouldn't have to be brutes ,there would not be bloodshed!) My favorite scene is the housebreaking: Poiret passes himself for an engineer,coming to check the cracks in the walls (the building may fall down!).He asks the maid for help :all she 'll have to do is to probe the walls with a hammer (=Marteau in French and "Etre Marteau" = to be nuts)while he is stealing the valuables .

In his late works ,Guitry had an obsession with old age and death;here he thumbs his nose at death ,in an unexpected immoral ending (but in a world gone crazy it's difficult to tell where morality is).

I wish the New Wave had had one tenth of Guitry's wit and sense of humor !This maybe the funniest comedy of the French late fifties and a must for everyone interested in this cinema.

My second Guitry, and a step down from 'La Poison', but a delightfully amoral spree nonetheless, filled with the French love of life and the French life of love.

It opens intriguingly enough, with a burglar surprising a potential suicide (the conversation which then follows between the two of them is classic Guitry) but sags a little in the middle with all the stuff in the rest home, and loses steam somewhat from then on. The courtroom scene is funny and I found myself wondering if Roberto Benigni had been influenced by the guy who wanders into the witness stand and then procedes to take over.

On the downside, the sets look cheap and ugly, more like television than film. The camerawork is for the most part flat and uninspired. Also the sound is very noticeably patchy and poor, and this doesn't seem to be because of the transfer. The ending feels like a Looney Tunes cartoon. Not sure if that's a good or bad thing.

In the end, it's a lively and enjoyable film, if one which falls some way short of a classic.

Speaking as one who is not exactly enamoured of Sacha Guitry's overblown, star-studded historical extravaganzas and who much appreciates his more intimate offerings, it is a joy to come across this, his penultimate film, in which he reconnects with his greatest love: caustic comedy.

Guitry was essentially a theatre animal for whom the verbal mattered more than the visual. The dialogue here sparkles, the piece unfolds masterfully and is extremely imaginative with the scenes in the clinic and courtroom approaching the surreal whilst the overall quirkiness is underlined by the score of Jean Francaix.

The icing on the cake of course is the casting of Jean Poiret as idler Philippe and Michel Serrault as burglar Albert who had impressed Guitry with their immensely successful cabaret act. Their comic timing is impeccable and the way they bounce off each other is a joy to behold. Fast forward seventeen years and this duo struck gold with Poiret's play 'La Cage aux Folles' which ran for five years and was subsequently filmed with Serrault reprising his Albin/Zaza and Poiret replaced by Ugo Tognazzi as Renato.

One would imagine that the theme of a man being imprisoned for the crime of another is a reference to Guitry's internment as a suspected Vichy collaborationist during the feeding frenzy that followed the Liberation. Although released without charge the stigma remained and Guitry became an easy target for the leftist press.

Nearly seventy years on this remains a comic gem which can be happily revisited.

Thief Michel Serrault enters the apartment of Jean Poiret. Poiret is trying to kill himself, but lacks the nerve. He offers Serrault 200,000 francs to kill him, and tell him the long and winding story of how an affair with Magali Noël led him to a long career of murder and thievery.

Sacha Guitry's movie sags a bit in the middle, but soon picks up, with the writer-director's typical disdainful, amoral, cynical witticisms. If Poiret's recitation of events is not as sparkling as Guitry's would have been, but Serrault's amiable audience is continually amusing. Darryl Cowl has a fine bit as a long-winded trial witness, and Lucien Baroux is wasted as the head doctor at a loony bin Poiret attends. If it is not as consistently sparkling as many of Guitry's works, there are many sections that are a lot of fun.

Sacha Guitry's next-to-last film, "Assassins Et Voleurs" (1956), is an airy, sophisticated, ironic, if also lightweight and sometimes indulgent crime comedy. It's a film that seems to be made primarily for the joy of its own artifice: it is crammed with plot twists and wild coincidences, upon which even the characters themselves comment. For a long while it seems to proceed without a purpose, but stick with it, because the final sections are arguably the best. The dialogue also contains plenty of wordplay - the more fluent you are in French, the more you'll probably get out of this film, even if you watch it with English subtitles. **1/2 out of 4.