Le Colonel est de la revue (1957)
Directed by Maurice Labro

Film Review

Following the success of their collaboration on Monsieur Leguignon lampiste (1952) and Leguignon guérisseur (1954), director Maurice Labro and actor Yves Deniaud joined forces on two other comedies, this time in the comédie policière line: On déménage le colonel (1955) and Le Colonel est de la revue.  The latter of these is one of Labro's weaker films, one that starts out with a brilliant premise (society folk playing at gangsters) but carelessly squanders it on a silly plot which ends up with a lot of pointless running around.  Compared with Labro's earlier comedies, which included two very popular Fernandel vehicles, L'Héroïque Monsieur Boniface (1949) and Boniface Somnambule (1951), this one is pretty lightweight.

Daft and uneven as the film is, it does presage some of the classic entries in the comedy-thriller genre that were to come, most notably Georges Lautner's Les Tontons flingueurs (1963) and Ne nous fâchons pas (1966).  A leading radio star at the time, Yves Deniaud received top billing but he is pretty well surplus to requirements, too easily eclipsed by an unbeatable trio of comedy performers consisting of Dora Doll, Jean Tissier and Armand Bernard, whose combined efforts salvage what would almost certainly have been a dud without their presence.  Deniaud had enjoyed a successful career as a supporting artist since the late 1930s (debuting in Marcel Carné's Drôle de drame) but he died not long after he achieved some measure of stardom in the mid-1950s, at the age of 58.

Le Colonel est de la revue may not be a masterpiece but it does at least provide a very useful lesson in social etiquette.   'Ah, pas dans le poisson...' is of course the correct thing to say when someone shoots dead the person sitting next to you at a dinner party during the second course.  Not long after this comedy misfire, Maurice Labro would go on to direct one of his best and most popular films, the tense thriller Le Fauve est lâché (1959), which helped to cement Lino Ventura's reputation as the hard man of French cinema.

Film Synopsis

Calla and his darling wife Cora are members of a society gathering that meets up from time to time to play at being gangsters.  Their dinner parties rarely pass off without at least one guest being bumped off, although the guests who are so afflicted inevitably come back to life before the evening is over.  For their amusement, the friends decide to stage a fake jewel robbery, but the scheme goes horribly awry when the jeweller unwittingly supplies real jewels and a gang of genuine hoodlums tries to get in on the act...