I'm very angry that I've gone this long and nobody ever bothered to tell me about Le Trou, Jacques Becker's exemplary 1960 prison-break movie. What am I paying you people for?

( actual blog post within )

So I'm watching Robert Bresson's 1951 classic Diary of a Country Priest, which is a wonderful movie, but I can't get over the fact that the protagonist, a soft-spoken, painfully sensitive young man, bears an uncanny resemblance to the young Johnny Cash.

And while it doesn't exactly interfere with my enjoyment of the movie (both men have health problems, struggle with issues of faith, and wear black all the time) I have to admit that every once in a while I find myself imagining the young priest, while struggling to counsel some troubled parishioner, picking up a guitar and launching into "Get Rhythm." Which is probably not the effect the filmmaker intends.

I'm in the middle of writing a script, so my movie-renting rate has plummeted in the past few months. Several times I've thought about canceling my membership at Cinefile and the other day I walked into the store intending to do so (after returning my copy of Heaven's Gate, which I'd had for a month). But they had a copy of Jean-Pierre Melville's 1969 French Resistance thriller Army of Shadows available, so I thought "Well, let's hold off on canceling the membership for the moment."

(What you have to understand about Cinefile is that, as the only decent video store on the west side, all the good stuff is always out. Their copy of Vanishing Point was checked out last Easter and has never returned.)

I've seen a couple of Melville's movies before, Bob le Flambeur and Le Cercle Rouge, both of which I watched in my research on heist movies. There is something of Melville in Tarantino I find, with his emphasis on emotional intensity and subverting genre expectations, and his de-emphasis on plot mechanics. Although Melville's characters don't sit around yakking about pop-culture phenomena of the 70s.

YOUR ATTENTION, PLEASE: This post was originally at least twice as long.  Somewhere in the posting of it, half of it got mysteriously eaten by some livejournal program glitch.  This makes me angry, but I currently don't have the time or energy to re-write it.  Suffice to say, I liked this movie and so did urbaniak  .


[beginning of original post]

You know how I mentioned last time around how L'Avventura has no plot, yet is still tremendously exciting? Well, L'Eclisse has even less plot than L'Avventura, and is even more exciting. It's almost like Antonioni is daring himself to stretch this method of designing narratives as far as it will go.

[significant portion of post mysteriously eaten here.]


[description of first 50 minutes of the movie -- Vittoria's difficulty with relationships, her restlessness, her discomfort, her flight to Verona]

[we join the post half-way through -- I am describing a rather amazing 10-minute scene set in the buzz and flurry of a bad day at the stock exchange]

The first thing you need to know about L'Avventura is that it has no plot. The second thing you need to know about L'Avventura is that, in spite of having no plot, it is still tremendously exciting.

I don't know how it manages to do that.

This was a rare instance of urbaniak  actually requesting a movie to watch, rather than the two of us just kind of pawing through my DVD collection until we find something we both want to watch. He showed up with the movie clutched in his slender, spidery, indie-stalwart hands, still it its shrinkwrap, still with the price tag from Amoeba on it.

Two political thrillers of extremely different stripes this evening. The first, Yukio Mishima's short 1966 film Yukoku and then Costa-Gavras's 1969 political thriller Z. The two movies could not be more unalike: Yukoku is brief, stark, weird, highly stylized and almost freakishly intense, Z is naturalistic, frenetically shot and edited, alarming and intensely furious. The fact that they were made around the same time and come from polar opposites of the political spectrum make the evening that much more fun.

Texture is important.

These three movies have very little to do with each other, except that they are set in imaginary societies where people's freedoms are curtailed in ways we would find objectionable, and they were all at the video store at the same time as I was looking for Futuristic Dystopias to study.  And I suppose you could say that all three have male leads who are very good actors but stop short of being movie stars.

(Incidentally, if there's one thing all nightmare futures have in common, its that they all predict less freedom for their citizens.  Why won't anyone make a movie about a nightmare future where everyone has too much freedom?  Well, I suppose that's Idiocracy, actually.)

For my purposes here, they also all point to the importance of texture in this kind of movie.  I know this from Blade Runner, but Ridley Scott knew it from Metropolis.  If you get it wrong, your dark, futurist nightmare dates quickly, feels constrained and silly.  If you get it right, the texture makes the movie worth watching all by itself.

The Man Who Fell to Earth, for instance, is an example of a movie with a lot on its mind, but very little effort is spent on making us believe we are seeing the future.  The Island, meanwhile, has expended tons of effort in bringing us a vision of the future, but has very little on its mind.

SPOILER ALERT

The future of Code 46 seems completely plausible, almost here already.  The cars are the same cars we drive now and the buildings are the same ones we work in.  Apartments are smaller and have computer screens built into glass walls, and some quirky new words have worked their way into the language (like "papelle" and "cover" and "outside"), but there have been no radical leaps forward in fashion or architecture.  Tim Robbins and Samantha Morton meet and fall in love and that creates problems for them, but none of the weird things they have in their lives feel any more novel to them as computers and cell phones seem to us.  Designer "viruses" are just a part of their everyday life, along with "new fingers" and "memory albums" and the remote possibility of having sex with the clone of one's mother.  Director Michael Winterbottom even has the actors pitch their dialogue in a rushed murmur so that we have to lean forward to catch what they're saying.  It doesn't feel like a movie about the future, it feels like a movie from the future, in the same way that Barry Lyndon feels like a movie about the 18th century made in the 18th century.

Dark City is a, well, it's a weird movie.  A bunch of aliens have abducted a bunch of Earthlings and built a pretend city for them in the middle of space so they can study them and learn about the human soul.  For some reason, they've decided to make the city a Fake New York circa 1940s.  At the end of every day, the aliens stop time and rearrange the city, along with everyone's lives, then start up time again to see how people react.  Rufus Sewell is an Earthling who, for whatever reason, cottons to the aliens' plan and finds himself able to rearrange physical matter his own self.  (The movie is so weird that telling you all this doesn't really even give anything away -- all this is revealed within Act I.)  The texture here is overstuffed, overheated, delirious.   Cityscapes are obviously, unapologetically miniatures or computer-generated, doorways melt or appear out of nowhere, leading to streets, outer space or plunges.  Furniture stretches, walls expand, dishes and tchotchkes appear out of nowhere.  Streets are too narrow and lead to nowhere, everything feels like a movie set, which is partly the point.  It all works toward creating a sense that anything might happen.  Sort of funhouse version of The Matrix.

Metropolis is still the gold standard for this kind of movie.  The sets and effects, mind-blowing for their time, are still mind-blowing 80 years later.  The plot makes as much sense as Dark City, with the same kind of delirium present as well, but also carries with it a Serious Message about class warfare.  The son of an industrialist falls in love with a mysterious crusader and learns about the sorry life of the workers who make Metropolis run.  The industrialist father, wishing to put the woman's crusade to an end, asks a scientist friend to give his newly-created robot the face of the crusader, then train the robot to go and tell the workers to give up.  The scientist has his own personal vendetta against the industrialist and gives the robot-woman instructions to get the workers to revolt against the city thus provoking an apocolypse that threatens to kill the workers' children, start a revolution and kill the industrialist's son.  With a plot like that, the visuals better be pretty fantastic, and Metropolis does not disappoint; it's stuffed full of gigantic, complex sets with swelling tides of humanity coursing through them.  And the special-effects aren't impressive "for their time," they're impressive for, say, 1977.   The effect is incalcuable.  The mighty cityscapes with their elevated walkways, spotless streets and canyon-like vantages give an impression of overwhelming inhumanity while still maintaining their beauty and power.

(The theme of Metropolis, stated many times throughout, is "The Head and Hands must have a Mediator, which must be the Heart."  Lang doesn't seem to be arguing that the upper class is bad, just that they need to keep in touch with the lower class who make their machines run and maybe don't be so cruel to them.  Otherwise they seem to be perfectly nice people.)

The current Kino Video release is also the most complete assemblage of film elements of this movie and a near-complete restoration, and the results are jaw-dropping.  The print looks brand-new, scratchless, spotless, bright and lustrous.  As an added bonus, the score of the original run has been re-recorded, the goal being to present the movie as close as possible to its original premiere.  I've seen Metropolis before, but this felt like a completely different movie.

This is my idea of a holiday.  I have no meetings for a week, I don't have to think about Futuristic Dystopias or Moby-Dick or The End of the World for a few days, so I can indulge myself and watch a movie like Jules et Jim.  It is especially gratifying to see this after watching the stiff, leaden Fahrenheit 451, made a scant three years later.  It couldn't possibly be more different and could have used one-tenth of the energy or powers of observation that Jules et Jim has.

I was reading an interview with Woody Allen where he talks about Bullets Over Broadway and how he loved shooting Husbands and Wives with the hand-held shaky-cam jump-cut style but that you couldn't do that with a period piece because people have a certain mindset about how the past should look on film.  But that's exactly how Truffaut shoots the same time period in Jules et Jim, tossing in freeze-frames and wild pans and rushed zooms and a dozen other techniques that remind you that you're watching a brand-new movie about events fifty years in the past.  The first act of the picture, where Jules and Jim meet Catherine and World War I hasn't happened yet, is so breathlessly (pun not intended -- at least I don't think so) shot and edited and with such quicksilver energy that it takes a moment to realize that everyone is wearing funny clothes and driving vintage automobiles.  Truffaut cuts as often as Michael Bay; scenes and images fly by with the speed of fleeting memories.  How it was all shot I have no idea, all those shots of adventures glimpsed but not explained.  Did Truffaut board all those scenes (did he board anything)?  Were they scenes that once had dialogue but got cut out, except for those brief shots?  It seems like there are dozens of them.

For those unfamiliar with the movie, Jules and Jim are best friends living la vie Boheme in belle epoque Paris.  Jules meets Catherine and they fall in love.  Catherine is a capricious, complicated woman who also falls in love with Jim, but events conspire to put her together with Jules.  They get married and have a child, but Catherine is restless and inconstant and still wants Jim (among other men).  Instead of leaving Jules with the child, they invite Jim to live with them in the Rhine valley.  Everyone has the best intentions and is full of love, but they cannot keep from causing each other suffering as their complicated love story unfolds.

Catherine sounds like a handful, doesn't she?  And yet, I once knew a woman a lot like her.  She was very beautiful and charismatic, loved whoever she wanted to whenever she wanted to for as long as she wanted to, and never gave a thought to how she might be living tomorrow; there would always, it seemed, be someone there to take care of her, give her whatever she needed, indulge whatever whim she might have.  I have no trouble buying that such an arrangement might arise between a woman and a pair of of men in Europe between the wars.  And such a story could be really pulpy and soapy (if something can be both pulpy and soapy) but Truffaut handles it all with a wonderful dry-eyed realism,  with a sympathetic camera and journalistic editing style, letting the story speak for itself.

Imagine my surprise when I learned, elsewhere on the Criterion edition (where else?) that the movie is based on the true story of a clutch of real bohemians in the real Europe of 1914-34 (or so).  After watching the thrilling, lyrical movie it's great to watch the documentary included and hear the stories of the children of all these bohemians, who not only don't have particularly bad memories of their parents' unconventional lifestyles but actually mostly idolize them.  If they critcise them, it's for their innocence, not their morality. 

Because morality is at the center of the story.  In the movie, Jules and Jim and Catherine make up their own rules for living from day to day.  Life, of course, imposes its own rules, as life will, and the conflict between the characters and the immutable laws of the universe forces a tragic end to their story.  It's sort of a metaphor for the whole belle epoch lifestyle, legislating its own morality until the Nazis come along with their own vision of morality, one enforced at gunpoint.

In real life however, Jules's and Jim's and Catherine's lives don't end in 1934.  They all go on with their lives, raise children in various places around Europe, make livings in the margins of the literary world, have innumerable other affairs and complicated arrangements (Jim, for instance, after leaving Catherine and Jules, lived with three other women at once, promising to marry "whoever survived"), and live to ripe old ages (Catherine lived to be 96!).  Truffaut says that these arrangements must have caused great turmoil and suffering, but his movie is full of joy and life (the tone of which is apparently taken from the novel).  He didn't make a cautionary tale, he made a love story.

Sven Nykvist, sadly, is no longer the world's greatest living cinematographer.

I am both extremely proud and terribly ashamed to be the author of Curtain Call, Mr. Nykvist's last film. He was very kind to me, a young, unproven whippersnapper, and everyone else on our crew.  He told me a funny story about working with Tarkovsky and expressed, with total good humor, his frustration with working with Woody Allen.  My pathetic excuse for a romantic comedy was far below the typical material he worked with and I feel blessed to not only have had him shoot my script, but to actually have lit me for a cameo scene.

I knew that he was a great cinematographer when I was working with him, but like the philistine I am I did not see his work with Bergman until long after we parted ways. Had I seen, for instance, Through a Glass Darkly before I met him I doubt I would have been able to look him in the eye, I would have been too ashamed to work with so great an artist.

First of all, there is a new edition of Kurosawa's masterpiece out now from, of course, Criterion.  It's rather staggering in its quality.  If you've never seen the movie, you'll never have a better chance to experience it than now.  Even if you own the previous edition, just go out and buy the new one, I'm serious, it's just rather staggering.

Plenty of words have been spent talking about this movie so I'll keep this brief.

I pop this DVD in the machine, expecting to see a warm, humanist Renoir comedy/drama like Boudu Saved From Drowning, The Rules of the Game or Grand Illusion.  Turns out it's practically a freakin' Hitchcock movie.

This is a good thing.

A noir before it had a name (1938), La Bete Humaine is a dark tale of lust and murder set amid the railyards of 1930s Paris.  Noir, hell: the plot is practically a chapter from Sin City: there's a good-looking working-class lug who worries that he might actually be a psychotic killer, a mild-mannered middle-management type who is driven to murder by jealousy and a femme fatale who lures men into murdering each other for her, all the while playing the weak, innocent victim.

Because it's Renoir, of course, things are more complicated than that.  As the guy says in Rules of the Game, "Everyone has their reasons."  You never look at the psycho as anything remotely like a monster, the jealous husband is never belittled or scorned and the femme is both plainly manipulative and sadly victimized.

It's a real pleasure to watch an artist so effortlessly and confidently in command of his tools.  The movie is endlessly suspenseful and surprising while never becoming sensational or italicized.  It's Hitchcock without the devices and the remote coldness.

I'm not overly familiar with Zola, but I'm surprised at how pulpy his sense of plot is.  I worked on an adaptation of Therese Raquin a while back, and that book not only has lust and murder and intrigue, but also ghosts and hallucinations and an operatic level of dread.  I have no idea what the novel of Bete is like but it sounds like it's just a notch more highbrow than, say, Jim Thompson.

The notes refer to the plot as a "triangle" (between the lug, the femme and the husband), but I detect a fourth player: Lison, the locomotive that the lug (Jean Gabin) works on.  Renoir gives the train a full 7-minute wordless introduction as Gabin guides it thundering down the track, through tunnels and into the station.  We see that Gabin has an intimate relationship with the engine, which he underscores later on when someone asks him why he doesn't have a girlfriend.  "Oh, I do have a girlfriend," he says, "Lison."  (Just the fact that he's given his locomotive a name, much less a woman's name, says plenty right there.)  Later, when he, without preamble, almost strangles a girlfriend to death on an embankment, the only thing that stops him is a train going by: it's almost as though he's in a carnal embrace and interrupted by his "wife" entering the room.  He breaks off the strangulation and stomps off, guilty and disgusted with himself.  Not that he almost killed a woman but because he feels weak and out of control.  (Strangest of all, the woman sympathises with him and they walk off together, finishing their date as though nothing had happened [apparently they'd come to that impasse before].)  We get the sense that Lison is a stabilizing force in Gabin's life, that he lavishes all his affection and labor over this locomotive because if he ever stops working, he'll have no choice but to murder someone.  And indeed, once he does finally murder someone, he turns himself in not to the police but to Lison, as though the locomotive is the only one who can judge him.

A young woman takes care of her widowed father. Everyone thinks that the daughter should get married. But the daughter is happy just taking care of her father. That is, until the father announces that he intends to remarry and the daughter is forced to make a decision.

And that's it, that's the plot of Yasujiro Ozu's Late Spring. Oh, there's a third-act "surprise," but plot isn't really the point of Ozu's films.

The polar opposite of Kurosawa's operatic dramas and the popular samurai epics of the time, Ozu's domestic dramas are minimalist, realist, quiet and reserved. In fact, they are in many ways about being reserved. Observational and behavioral in the extreme, they don't feel like any other Japanese movies I know of. Instead they remind me of Austen and Chekhov, Raymond Carver and Jim Jarmusch.

Like Jarmusch, Ozu's dramatic strategy sometimes takes a little getting used to. His films may appear to be "boring" for the first half-hour or so as you watch people in mid-20th-century Japan go about their daily lives, cooking and working and eating and gossiping. You're waiting for the movie to start. Then, as the first act edges into the second and patterns start to repeat themselves, you begin to realize that you weren't just watching random behavior, you were watching very specific, emblematic behavior, tiny little actions as simple as folding a napkin or raising a drinking glass that, if you had been paying attention, would have told you all you need to know about the characters you've been watching. Ozu's dramas are, in fact, about the way tiny little actions become habit, habit becomes identity, and identity is threatened by change. And as you start to become aware of the "plot," these tiny little actions start to take on more and more significance. So suddenly, the way someone walks or talks or eats a piece of cake becomes terribly important, as it may contain a vital clue to the character's inner life, and by the middle half-hour you're on tenterhooks trying to figure out if people are really saying what they mean, if they're hiding some terrible secret, if they're ever going to give their domineering parents what for, if they're ever going to be happy. Then, by the third act, the accumulated drama, during which no one ever speaks above a conversational tone, invariably becomes almost unbearably moving. Then, typically, a character must face some sort of universal human truth, like, say, everyone has to grow up, or everyone has to pursue their own happiness, or everyone has to die. "That's just the way human life is," a character will often sigh near the end of an Ozu picture. And those ideas aren't new or revelatory, but in the context of Ozu's pictures they take on the weight of heartbreaking profundity.

Ozu, in addition to being a hugely skilled dramatist, has an utterly unique shooting style as well. He has, essentially, one setup: the camera at the eye-level of a person sitting cross-legged on the floor. This setup remains essentially unchanged whether it's an interior, exterior, dialogue scene, action scene (well, "action" having a very tiny definition here -- a stack of magazines sliding off a chair constitutes an "action" beat in Late Spring), even establishing shots will be shot from the same angle. He also rarely moves the camera at all. I can't remember a single tilt, pan or dolly in one of his movies, or even a zoom. There are a total of four tracking shots in Late Spring, all of which are used for "walk and talk" scenes, and all keeping the "Ozu angle" intact, as though we are watching the shots from the POV of a man sitting in a Radio Flyer wagon being pulled by a slowly moving car. In addition, he will sometimes have entire dialogue scenes covered in POV shots, with characters delivering their lines directly to camera. It creates an almost unnerving intensity; as actors zero in on you, you want to look away from their gaze in embarrassment. Jonathan Demme used the same technique for an important scene in Silence of the Lambs.

Ozu also used the same actors throughout his entire career. The two leads here, Chisu Ryu and Setsuko Hara are in most of the Ozu pictures I've seen, and they never fail to astound.  They use an acting vocabulary so different from what I'm used to as an American that I can't even think of American equivalents to compare them to.  Ryu's permanent little twisted smile and Hara's ever-heartbreaking hope and despair get under your skin in ways that even great stars like Toshiro Mifune and Tatsuya Nakadai do not.  Those guys are movie stars, but Ryu and Hara seem like real people.

My love affair with Ozu began with Tokyo Story, which is him at his heaviest for him.  For lighter fare, there is the comedy Good Morning.  But my personal favorite is Floating Weeds, which is about a traveling actor who swing by a seaside town for the first time in fifteen years and finds that he long ago fathered a child by a woman he had slept with for a night.

One more thing I should say is that the Criterion Collection has changed my life.  I have something in my brain that does not allow me to pay proper attention to bad prints of old movies with corrupted soundtracks.  Classics like Dracula and His Girl Friday and It Happened One Night went unwatched by me because I couldn't watch the terrible murky prints they showed on television.  But give me a restored print and a fine, crackling soundtrack and I can watch just about anything, I don't know why but it really makes a difference to me.  So I owe my interest in Ozu, Kurosawa, Bergman, Renoir and countless other great directors to the work done by Criterion.

Oh, and the projector is fixed, obviously.  Hurray!

Spoiler alert.

There is a guy. He has a friend. They both like the same girl.

There is a man who calls himself Dr. Caligari. He has a carnival act, what he calls a "somnambulist."

Dr. C is mistreated by an impatient clerk.

The clerk is found stabbed to death in his bed. This upsets the citizenry.

The guy and his friend go to the carnival and see Dr. C and his somnambulist, whose name is Cesare.

Cesare, played by Conrad Veidt, has a thin, weird, unsettling, urbaniak-style creepiness about him. He sleeps in a coffin, the "cabinet" of the title.  (For unrivalled creepiness, check him out in The Man Who Laughs, where he inspired the Batman folks to create The Joker.)

Dr. C says that Cesare can tell the future. The guy's friend steps forward and says, with a laugh, "How long will I live?" Cesare stares at him with his Urbaniak glare and says "'til break of day."

That night, Dr. C sends the sleepwalking Cesare out into the night to murder the guy's friend in his bed. He does so. This upsets the citizenry.

The guy now has the girl, but she's upset because the friend has been stabbed to death in his bed. Her father, sensitive to this type of thing, goes to investigate the doctor and his somnambulist. The father goes out to the fairgrounds and finds that a dummy rests in Cesare's coffin.

Cesare, at that moment, has gone to the girl's house to kill her. He is startled in his efforts by some local citizenry, who chase him through town (shades of Fritz Lang's M).*

The guy goes chasing after Dr. C and follows him to an insane asylum. The staff of the asylum grab the guy, who is hysterical. He insists that the man responsible for the death of his friend and the abduction of his fiancee is in their asylum. The orderlies take the guy to the head doctor, who turns out to be -- yes, Dr. Caligari.

The guy waits until the doctor is out of his office, then ransacks his files until he finds the proof that he is behind the mysterious murders in town. It seems that this doctor, inspired by an Italian man named Dr. Caligari, decided to perform an experiment on a cataleptic, to see if he could get a sleeping man to do things he would not do when awake. Once he had done so, it appears that the doctor got a little carried away, getting poor Cesare to kill just about anyone who inconvenienced the doctor.

The guy, burning with righteous fury, accuses the doctor, who denies everything until the body of the dead Cesare, who has apparently collapsed in a field outside of town, is brought in. At this point, the doctor also collapses, in grief, and spills the beans about his psychiactric misdeeds. He is bound in a strait-jacket and carted off to one of his own cells.

All well and good. But then, in a Donald Kaufman-esque twist ending, we PULL BACK TO REVEAL that this tale is being told to us by the guy, who, for some reason, STILL LIVES AT THE INSANE ASYLUM. We come to find that his fiancee is there, and Cesare too, and that they're all quite stark raving mad. So apparently none of this involving tale is true.

In addition to the twist ending (or as M. Night Shamalyan calls them the "paradigm shift"), there's the matter of the sets.

They are deliberately weird, fake, flat, hand-made, crazy, unsettling and bizarre. Unlike anything that's been done before or since, I don't know why. And at first you're like "What's with the sets?" But then, when the twist ending comes, you say "Oh, I see, because the narrator is crazy." Frankly, I don't know why this experiment has never been repeated. Only recently, with movies like Sin City and A Scanner Darkly has this kind of heavily stylized, deliberate artificiality found its way into a mainstream feature.  Correct me if I'm wrong.

And, of course, I'm thinking about a remake.

The thing I like best about the movie, aside from the visionary sets and the ahead-of-its-time narrative, is the film's ideas about guilt.  Dr. C has found a way to commit evil acts with a clean conscience -- he's not the one killing people, Cesare is.  Cesare, on the other hand, also feels no guilt because he doesn't even know that he's killing anyone.  People die, citizenry is hysterical, and no one has to pay a penalty.  No one is guilty.  No wonder the protagonist has gone insane.

*smarty-pant film students will recall that Lang was first asked to direct Caligari.

1958. Directed by Mario Monicelli.

THE SHOT: A ragtag group of lovable screwups plots a less-than-ingenious heist of a pawnbroker's safe.

TONE: Charming, roguish humor, humming with a wise and witty stance on human life.

Heat it is not.  The gang is unprofessional in the extreme.  On the one hand, they don't have a clue as to what they're doing.  On the other hand, it does not turn out that one of the gang is a trigger-happy psychopath.  The love stories woven into the plot seem natural and revealing of character, instead of being shoehorned in.  The comedy is easy, organic and human in scale.

The back of the box says that this is a satire of Rififi and its ilk.  Satire it's not.  It's warm, affectionate and bittersweet and requires no special knowledge of those films to enjoy.

DOES CRIME PAY?  Well....no.

Two French comedies with exclamation points in their titles.

Faites Sauter La Banque!, or Let's Break the Bank!, is a Louis de Funes vehicle from 1963. I had been promised (warned?) that de Funes was "The French Jerry Lewis" (whatever THAT means), so I was expecting something quite broad, if not unwatchably garish and shrill.

Luckily, de Funes is nothing like that. Born in 1914, he made over 100 movies in France. In Banque! he comes off not so much like Jerry Lewis but Jackie Gleason. He doesn't have Gleason's weight or immense presence (he is, in fact, rather slight and unassuming in appearance, more Joe Pesci than Jackie Gleason), but he plays a similar character: the long suffering, easily frustrated, put-upon paterfamilias, who's just trying to keep his head above water and will resort to crazy schemes to do so.

American audiences will recognize this character not just from Gleason but Fred Flintstone (I know, I know), Fred's futuristic cousin George Jetson, Fred MacMurray from My Three Sons, and Dagwood Bumstead (all of which more or less overlap in time; what was going on in world culture that these put-upon dads all showed up at the same time?)

The crazy scheme this time around is: de Funes has been defrauded of his life savings by the unscrupulous banker whose bank is across the street from de Funes's sporting-goods shop. de Funes hatches a harebrained scheme to tunnel under his store and into the bank vault, and enlists the aid of his foggy, scatterbrained family to complete the task.

Complications ensue, as they inevitably must.

It's fleet, it's funny, it's only a little dated, it has no ending, and it zips by in an hour and twenty-three minutes.

de Funes's comedy is only a wee bit broad, based in stage performance but not distractingly so, very quick and very detailed.

Woody Allen fans will note that Allen lifted the basic concept and an entire scene from Faites Sauter La Banque! for use in Small Time Crooks, where the bank robbers hit a water main, then rush upstairs to the store to get repairing supplies and find the last person who they want to know about the tunnel. Even a couple of lines of dialogue made it into Allen's film.

Rrrrrrr! is a much later comedy (2004) written and directed by Alain Chabat, who has made a name for himself in France as a creator of solidly, unapologetically commercial comedies.

Rrrrrrr! is what I would call a "prehistoric procedural," the story of the world's first homicide investigation, in fact the story of the world's first homicide. There is serial killer loose in caveman days, and a pair of slackers are assigned the task of finding the culprit.

The movie is very funny, succeeding most when it sends up conventions of policiers ("don't worry, they can't see you through this two-way rock" says one of the detectives to a wary witness). The humor is rather Pythonesque, and Americans can be assured that this is a genuine cultural artifact by the presence of Gerard Depardieu and Jean Rochefort in supporting roles.

Sight gags and linguistic jokes abound. Everyone in the tribe is named Pierre (or "Stan" in the English translation), due apparently to a lack of imagination on the part of the tribal chieftain. All animals in the movie have mammoth-like tusks, including ducks, chickens and frogs. A babysitter is paid "half a boarmoth" for watching the kids.

The murderer is revealed early on. The characters, and indeed the movie, are in no hurry. There is no mystery to speak of, and the stakes remain low throughout the movie, the better for the gags to flow.

I have no idea if either of these movies are available in any form in the US.