Le Cavalier Lafleur (1934)
Directed by Pierre-Jean Ducis

Film Review

One of the most popular comedy genres in French cinema of the 1930s was the barracks comedy, which may well have originated from André Mouézy-Éon and André Sylvane's popular stage play Tire-au-flanc, first performed in 1904.  Jean Renoir had adapted the play for cinema in 1928, and over the next decade there were scores of similar films poking fun at life in the French army, reusing the same gags and situations until they became old favourites.  Rising star Fernandel featured in several of these popular but formulaic comedies, including Maurice Tourneur's Les Gaietes de l'escadron (1932) and Maurice Cammage's Le Coq du regiment (1933).

Fernandel's naive and anarchic comedy persona made him ideal for the part of the low-ranking solider who gets into scrape after scrape, and other assorted imbroglios, with his commanding officers.  In Le Cavalier Lafleur, he plays a womanising reservist whose attempt to swap places with a man having the same name ends, predictably, in disaster.  The gags are as stale and predictable as the plot, but the film has an infectious sense of fun about it, which it owes entirely to the youthful Fernandel and his talented co-stars Louvigny and Pierre Larquey.

The film was adapted from an operetta by André Mauprey and Louis Reine and was directed (with a frightening scarcity of talent) by Pierre-Jean Ducis, who also helmed the early Tino Rossi vehicle Au son des guitares (1936).  As was typical for this kind of comedy, the rambling narrative is punctuated by several excruciatingly bad musical numbers (some of which were released as records not long afterwards, proving that domestic masochism was rife in 1930s France).  Le Cavalier Lafleur is just about salvaged by Fernandel's exuberant performance, but it's hardly the highpoint of his career.  In common with much of the actor's early work, this muddled comedy is probably best left to gather dust.

Film Synopsis

With his wife conveniently out of the way in Nanteuil, a young reservist named Lafleur is free to indulge his skirt-chasing habits in Vernouillet, the town where he is presently stationed.  On the day he planned to meet up with his mistress, Odette, he is assigned to a platoon that is to meet an important dignitary at Nauteuil.  As luck would have it, there is another man with the same name as him in his squadron.  The two men swap their roles, but the original Lafleur is appointed his lieutenant's aide-de-camp, and the two end up being billeted with the wife of the other Lafleur.  A series of misunderstandings quickly ensues, but all turns out well in the end...