À vos ordres, Madame (1942)
Directed by Jean Boyer

Film Review

À vos ordres, Madame is one of Jean Boyer's more sophisticated comedies, one that appears to have been modelled on the lively American screwball comedies of the time.  In a career that spanned three and half decades, Boyer turned out over sixty films, most of which are (justifiably) forgotten, but amidst the dross there are some veritable pearls, and this is one of them.  À vos ordres, Madame excels not only on the writing front, it is also well-directed and the surging comedy momentum is marvellously sustained by the performances from its extremely talented lead actors.  If there was one film which represented the best in mainstream French comedy during the Occupation era, this is surely it.

Jean Tissier and Suzanne Dehelly are never less than hilarious as the two long suffering married couple who discover a new lease of life through an enforced stopover at a snob hotel.  Tissier needs no introduction - at the time, he was one of French cinema's most sought-after character actors, equally adept at playing comedy and drama in a wide variety of roles.  Rarely cast as the lead but always an admirable support, Tissier must have relished the opportunity to take the lead part in this wacky comedy and gives what is probably the most dazzling comic performance of his career.  Dehelly likewise never became a great film star but she was highly regarded both as an actor and as a singer, and, as she shows in this film, she was a formidable comedy performer.  You'd never think it but Dehelly was also an avid chess player and, a year after making this film, she won the women's national chess championship in France.  Two other actors better known for drama than comedy, Alfred Adam and Jacqueline Gauthier, help to keep the humour engine ticking over nicely, aided and abetted by Jacques Louvigny and Pierre Labry. 

À vos ordres, Madame differs from most mainstream French comedies of this period in that it is not centred around a star comic performer (Fernandel, Noël-Noël, Raimu, etc.), and it is all the better for that.  Essentially, it's a classic French farce (of the Feydeau variety) with a 1940s American twist (you can easily imagine a Hollywood equivalent directed by Ernst Lubitsch or Howard Hawks).   It may not have the subtlety of Jean Renoir's La Règle du jeu (1939) but it still makes an effective class satire, only much pacier and much funnier.  Lively but never silly, this superior Jean Boyer offering is as hilarious today as any modern comedy, and this is down to a gag-laden script which could hardly fail to reduce an audience to hysterics, with the unflagging support of Tissier and Dehelly at their absolute best.

Film Synopsis

Odette and Hector Depuis, husband and wife for twenty-five years, are en route for their holiday when their car breaks down.  They have no choice but to spend the night at a luxury hotel whilst their car is repaired.  Never one to waste a franc if she can help it, the miserly Odette Depuis coerces her husband into pretending to be her chauffeur whilst she masquerades as a baroness.  As Hector has fun 'below stairs', amusing himself with his new drinking buddies and the pretty maid Angèle, his wife attracts the attention of a wealthy widower, Monsieur Palureau.  Hector likes his new life so much that he sabotages his car, thereby prolonging his stay at the hotel by another few days.  When Madame Depuis learns that her husband has been entertaining a chambermaid she is outraged and immediately goes on a mad spending spree, to the distress of the hotel manager...