La Bonne tisane (1958)
Directed by Hervé Bromberger

Film Review

The success of Jacques Becker's Touchez pas au grisbi (1954) made the gritty modern crime-thriller the most popular genre at the French box office in the 1950s, but by the end of the decade it was beginning to looking a little dépassé and two important developments were necessary to ensure the genre's survival into the following decades.  The first was a gradual shift towards increasing realism, which meant more violence and more convincing plots.  The second was in the opposite direction, exploiting the genre's tired clichés for comic effect.  Bizarrely, and almost uniquely, Hervé Bromberger's La Bonne tisane attempts to do both of these things in the same film, and the results are predictably messy.

The one inescapable flaw of Bromberger's film is that it tries to have its cake and eat it, i.e. to be a serious, hard-edged gangster film and yet, at the same time, send the genre up.  It's neither consistently thrilling nor consistently funny, just an oddly muddled half-way-house that is occasionally shocking and intermittently amusing.  The film courted controversy with its far from flattering portrayal of life on the wards of state-run French hospitals.  Bedside manner is distinctly lacking as a cynical chief surgeon (a likeably nasty Raymond Pellegrin) tyrannises both staff and patients, whilst the nurses whinge endlessly about a profession they hate and are clearly ill-suited for.  Had the film confined itself to being a grimly tongue-in-cheek portrait of French health care it might have worked.  Alas, its authors had to tack on a tired gangster plot that runs through every cliché in the book before collapsing in an ungainly mess.  The final shoot out in the hospital grounds has to be the most idiotically far-fetched scene in any French crime film, and it's a pity it is so superbly orchestrated.  Imagine a Tarantino-style gore fest tagged on to the end of Carry On Doctor and you'll have some idea how incongruous it is.

The script may be all over the place, the direction generally uninspired (save one or two excellent scenes with an amusingly Tarantino-esque lack of restraint), but thankfully the performances are top-notch and prevent the whole thing ending up as a completely inept farce.  Raymond Pellegrin is as implausibly cast in the role of a dedicated surgeon as Madeleine Robinson is for the part a gangster's moll, but because both actors are cast against type their one-dimensional characters suddenly come to life and give the film a reason to be.  In their delicate hands (aided by a stunning Estella Blain), La Bonne tisane is resuscitated and ends up being both an anti-gangster film and an anti-hospital drama.  Cast as the Ventura-like hoodlum, Bernard Blier has a solid presence that gives muscle to the gangster half of the film (something that his co-star Roland Lesaffre patently lacks).  This film marked an important turning point in Blier's career, granting him passage to those marvellous parodic gangster roles in such films as Le Monocle noir (1961) and Les Tontons flingueurs (1963).  La Bonne tisane is a pretty indigestible brew but it provided a badly needed shot in the arm for France's film policier - a pretty desperate case of kill or cure.  Luckily, the patient survived.

Film Synopsis

After spending several years abroad, gangster boss René Leconte returns to France to resume his criminal exploits. He is welcomed by his mistress Maine and chauffeur Roger, but soon discovers that business is not what it was. In his absence, he has acquired a dangerous rival in Nino, who intends to kill him.  When Leconte keeps a rendezvous with Nino he is ambushed and left for dead.   Miraculously, Leconte survives the attack and manages to drag himself to a nearby hospital.  He is discovered by a trainee nurse, Thérèse, who brings him in to be treated by the unsympathetic Dr Augereau.  Realising that his employer risks being picked up by the police, Roger visits the hospital, posing as a police inspector.  Getting Leconte to safety proves to be much harder than he had imagined...