Coup dur chez les mous (1956)
Directed by Jean Loubignac

Film Review

Having notched up a popular success with Ah ! les belles bacchantes (1956), director Jean Loubignac brought down the curtain on his pretty undistinguished film career with this hopelessly inept comedy.  More of a high-grade soporific for the saddest species of masochist than a rib-tickler, Coup dur chez les mous boasts a wealth of comedic talent but, scripted and directed with virtually nothing in the way of flair or originality, it is an excruciating ordeal to sit through.  As the narrative plods along like a heavily inebriated mastodon trying in vain to cross a darkened warehouse laden with bric-a-brac the film occasionally hits the mark with a well-timed, well-executed gag, but for the most part it is a dismal exercise in futility - a classic case of a film that really has no reason to be and even less reason to be preserved for posterity.

The previous year, Jane Sourza and Raymond Souplex had had a notable hit with Sur le banc (1955), an entertaining little comedy based on their popular radio series.  With these two talented performers headlining Coup dur chez les mous you'd have though the film would be another comedy delight, but no.  Despite getting top billing, Sourza doesn't show up until the last third of the film, and even then she is pretty well wasted in a role that is frankly way beneath her abilities.  Meanwhile, Souplex mugs his way through the entire production as the worst comicbook caricature of a gangster type that you can imagine.  Heaven knows what possessed Sourza and Souplex to lend their names to this comedy disaster - it's surprising their careers weren't brought to an immediate standstill.

The eye-pleasing Jeannette Batti takes up most of the runtime, which wouldn't have been a bad thing if she had at least a smidgen of talent as a comic actress, which alas she patently hasn't (at least not enough to carry a film of this degree of awfulness).  Even Henri Génès, usually a likeable comedian, fails to shine and soon becomes tedious as a stooge of the most cretinous kind you can conceive.   And then there is the grim chorus of comic second raters who are well past their prime and are merely going through the motions of earning an honest living.  Julien Carette, Armand Bernard and Jean Tissier all look as if they have lost the will to live, just as you will when you sit through their drearily puerile attempts to be funny.

After making a career of knocking out third rate crowdpleasers of this ilk (that's 'crowdpleasing' in the most bitterly ironic sense of the term), Jean Loubignac did French cinema an immense favour by taking his retirement.  As you sit through Coup dur chez les mous, cringing all the way at the feeble attempts at humour and frantically wishing the world would end, you can't help feeling you are being slowly lobotomised - without an anaesthetic and by a palsy-stricken surgeon who can't tell his hypothalamus from his pituitary gland.  So much for the Geneva Convention on Human Rights...

Film Synopsis

Totor and Jo are two petty criminals who can hardly believe their good fortune when they succeed in robbing a jewellers' shop in Paris.  To wrong-foot the gendarmes who are patrolling the district, they dive into a bistro for a well-deserved celebratory snack.  Unfortunately, when they leave they do so not with the suitcase filled with their ill-gotten gains, but an identical one belonging to a door-to-door salesman, Ernest Mamourette.  It proves to be a fortuitous mishap, as the crooks are then pounced on by the police and have a lucky escape.  Not so Ernest, who ends up in prison after the canny bistro owner tips off the police.

Mistaking the harmless salesman for an experienced hoodlum, Totor's daughter Gigi decides he will make a valuable addition to their gang.  To that end, she persuades her father to help Ernest escape from prison in the course of a bogus marriage ceremony in which she, disguised as a foreign noblewoman, marries the salesman.  Ernest's baptism of fire will be to assist Totor and his criminal associates in robbing the grand house of the countess Olga Ivaroff.  To the gang's surprise, the latter is still in residence, but she is determined to kill herself and enlists the intruders' help in putting an end to her days.  The countess seems to have a charmed life and even when it looks as if she is well and truly out of the way the gang's problems are far from over...