Le Caïd (1960)
Directed by Bernard Borderie

Film Review

Before he scored his biggest successes with the popular Angélique series of films in the mid-1960s, director Raymond Borderie first made his mark on mainstream French cinema with a series of gutsy film noir pastiches which were very much in the mould of American gangster and spy thrillers of the 1940s.  His 1953 film La Môme vert-de-gris started off the successful run of Lemmy Caution films that made a star of Eddie Constantine, and Lino Ventura's early career received a boost when he took the lead role in the first two Gorille films directed by Borderie, the noir pastiche now well and truly skewed towards affectionate parody.  Just as the director was about to change course and switch from comedy thriller to historical swashbucklers he joined up with comic icon Fernandel for yet another of the latter's fish-out-of-water comedies.

Fernandel was by now no stranger to the comédie policière and had enjoyed immense success in the genre with Maurice Labro's L'Héroïque Monsieur Boniface (1949) and Henri Verneuil's L'Ennemi public numéro (1953).  Raymond Borderie was more an action director than a comedy director, so the film that he and the comedy giant ending up making - Le Caïd - was very different to earlier Fernandel offerings, much closer to the grittier noir thrillers that were coming out of Hollywood in the mid-1950s.  In this much more vicious kind of parody, Fernandel looks more out of place than usual, and it is this uncomfortable incongruity (almost as surprising as finding Mr Bean in a Quentin Tarantino film) that is its main asset.

Borderie directs the film with his customary flair, making it as authentic an imitation of its American noir counterpart as he can manage, and in doing so he often gives the impression he has forgotten it is supposed to be a comedy.  The body count is probably the highest of any Fernandel film (if not any French film comedy of this era) and the shootouts are only marginally less violent than those in a Martin Scorsese film (admittedly without all the gore and visceral horror).  The humour gets lost along the way, although there are a few memorable gags.  To take his mind off the gangster nightmare his life has become, Fernandel blithely walks into a cinema and is confronted with another burst of violence on the big screen - an excerpt from Borderie's recent Ventura film Le Gorille vous salue bien (1958).

Barbara Laage fits the bill admirably as the stunning femme fatale, and you can't help wondering why this sensual Veronica Lake look-a-like never became a much bigger star.  Georges Wilson and Marcel Bozzuffi are no less well-suited for the roles of the conscienceless hoodlums that turn Fernandel's cosy little world inside-out, and Claude Piéplu makes his presence felt (as the only obvious comedy character in the film) at the very start of his screen career.  Le Caïd is somewhat lacking in originality and, for the most part, struggles to be remotely funny, but Borderie's no-nonsense direction and the solid performances from all of the lead actors make it a fairly entertaining afternoon timewaster, although it is far from being a classic.

Film Synopsis

An oil refinery in southern France is the site of a bloody hold-up in which a crook named Toni escapes with thirty million francs.  With a rival gang chasing after him, Toni takes a train bound for Paris and finds himself sharing a compartment with Justin Mignonnet.  A well-regarded philosophy professor, Mignonnet is on his way to a conference at which he has been invited to give a lecture on metaphysics.  A timid man by nature, he is petrified when Toni produces a gun and forces him to discard the contents of his suitcase and put in their place a satchel containing the stolen money.  Before they go their separate ways as the train pulls into Paris Toni lets Mignonnet know he will be in touch with him later to arrange the return of his ill-gotten gains in exchange for the professor's identity papers.

Once the collection point has been decided on - a room in a hotel in Pigalle - Mignonnet is driven by his conscience to tip off of the police.  Things start to go badly wrong when Toni fails to keep the appointment and Rita, one of his associates, shows up in his place.  Mignonnet refuses to hand over the satchel to no one but Toni, but this manoeuvre merely gives the Parisian underworld the impression that he is himself a hoodlum.  Once Toni has been gunned down in a violent confrontation with the police, a rival gang led by Monsieur A begins to take an interest in Mignonnet.  Despite his best efforts, the unfortunate professor is unable to rid himself of the seemingly jinxed stolen banknotes and after Rita goes missing he finds himself at the tender mercies of France's most ruthless gangster...