Le Gendarme à New York (1965)
Directed by Jean Girault

Film Review

Even before Le Gendarme de Saint-Tropez was released to popular acclaim in 1964, its director Jean Girault and lead actor Louis de Funès were envisioning a sequel.  No one - least of all de Funès - could have foreseen just how big a hit the first Gendarme film was going to be.  With an audience of 7.4 million, the film established de Funès as the most popular comic actor of his generation (after having already appeared in over a hundred films).  The following year, he would star in the three most commercially successful French films of the year - Le Corniaud (11.7 million), Le Gendarme à New York (5.5 million) and Fantômas se déchaîne (4.2 million).

With a much bigger budget (brought about by the international success of the preceding film), Le Gendarme à New York benefited from a costly location shoot on the other side of the Atlantic - a rare phenomenon for a mainstream French film of this period.  Of the many difficulties this presented the production team with the most significant was Jean Lefèvre's inability to take part in the location sequences set in New York City - this explains why the actor is absent from much of the film, to the great distress of his many fans.

Apparently unfazed by his sudden rise to stardom, Louis de Funès turns in another of his tour de force comic performances, delivering non-stop hilarity as the irascible police-chief for whom nothing ever seems to go right.  By now, he has developed a magnificent rapport with his co-star, Michel Galabru, who gets nearly as much comedy mileage from his role as the even more prone-to-tantrums Adjutant Gerber.  De Funès and Galabru made a such an effective double act in the first two Gendarme films, sparring off each other like a pair of rabid wild cats, that they were bound to keep coming back for more - one of the main factors in the on-going success of this film series.

Less smartly written than the first Gendarme film, this more ambitious sequel suffers somewhat from a distinct lack of plot and a surfeit of pointless running around.  Jean Girault's direction is even less inspired than usual (although not quite as bad as on the trash he turned out in later years), although with an actor of de Funès's calibre taking centre stage - and doing so with such unwavering comic brilliance - just about any second rate director would have sufficed.  More entertaining than the subsequent entries in the Gendarme series, this second offering of police mayhem has one triumphant sequence - a marvellously choreographed (and utterly side-splitting) parody of West Side Story.

Film Synopsis

With an international police conference due to take place in New York, the police brigade of St-Tropez is given the honour of attending the event as France's representative.  Chef Ludovic Cruchot, his adjutant Gerbier, and their band of ever-resourceful gendarmes set off by steam boat, blissfully unaware that Cruchot's daughter, Nicole, has smuggled herself aboard.  Our uniformed heroes take advantage of the long ocean crossing to improve their English.  They intend to make a good impression upon their arrival in the New World. 

Arriving in New York, the gendarmes are immediately confronted with cultural and language barriers that seem to be insuperable, even to men of their undoubted abilities.  Fougasse promptly falls ill and is whisked away to hospital, whilst Cruchot, imagining that he is seeing his daughter, is driven to consult a psychiatrist.  To gain admittance to America, Nicole passes herself off as a penniless orphan intent on finding a better life in the Land of the Free.  By chance, she runs into a journalist who, moved by her plight, manages to turn her into a national celebrity...