Tendre Poulet

Light, anarchic, entertaining French film about love, lust and murder in middle age, treated with considerable joie de vivre, even the murder part, as only the French and Spanish can. Waifish Annie Girardot and shambling Teddy bear Philippe Noiret are two unlikely lovers, but the story works on screen. Despite the underlying sexual themes of the film, the actual sexual content on screen is minimal and handled with a casualness that is the opposite of salacious. Antoine (Noiret) and Lise (Girardot) had a brief involvement while students at the Sorbonne. Now, 20 years later, he is a rumpled academic and she is a police inspector when they meet again. Antoine's radical politics, and the difficult case she's working, make Lise reluctant to reveal her occupation to him. Antoine, for his part, seems awfully slow to catch on that Lise is hot on the trail of a serial killer who's at large in Paris. Inevitably, the love story and the crime story converge, and eventually Antoine finds himself taken hostage by the killer and forced at gunpoint to drive the killer's getaway car. What the killer hasn't counted on is that the only form of personal transportation Antoine has used since college is a bicycle. He can barely drive the car; in fact, he can't figure out how to get out of first gear! There follows a low-speed chase through the streets of Paris that is one of the funniest chase sequences ever filmed.

"Tendre Poulet" was released in the U.S. under the English title "Dear Inspector." It was remade into a leaden, arthritic, flat-footed American TV movie in 1979 called "Dear Detective" starring Brenda Vaccaro. The Hollywood TV movie was considerably sanitized from the French version: What little, fluffy sexuality there was in the original film was cleaned up even further, and the fairly graphic murder of a plainclothes detective with an icepick (an important plot element that is something of a shock in the original) is watered down to a painful but otherwise not life-threatening stab wound in the remake.