Le Gendarme se marie (1968)
Directed by Jean Girault

Film Review

Le Gendarme se marie is the third and most popular entry in the popular Gendarme series of film comedies directed by Jean Girault and starring the legendary French comic actor Louis de Funès.  After their eventful sojourn in New York, Cruchot and his cheerily inept gendarme buddies are back in their home territory of Saint-Tropez for another round of mirth and mayhem, all leading to the highly improbable outcome that Cruchot gets himself a mate, in the shape of the series' new secret weapon - Claude Gensac.

This wasn't the first time that Madame Gensac had the honour of playing Louis de Funès's wife on screen.  She had already done so twice - first in Édouard Molinaro's screen version of the play Oscar (1967) and then in Girault's Les Grandes vacances (1968).  It was probably the chemistry that was apparent between the two talented performers in these films that led Cruchot to be married off - when you think about it, he's about as desirable a catch as a bout of bubonic plague.  Who in their right mind would want to marry a man who looks like an evil gargoyle with hemorrhoids and whose sole raison-d'être appears to be to bring as much misery as possible to the whole of humankind?  The ways of love are indeed strange...

Implausible though the scripted marriage is, the comic union is a masterstroke. What makes the match so perfect is that Gensac is always so unreasonably calm, whilst de Funès is forever uncontrollably twitchy. Temperamentally, they are complete opposites and, as any physics student knows, it is the unlike poles that attract.  Gensac plays the devoted wife as if she is completely blind to the multiple failings of de Funès's characters.  De Funès could fill their living room with dead bodies and Gensac would hardly bat an eyelid.  She'd be too preoccupied fitting the new curtains to notice.  This was one of French cinema's best comedy double acts and it endured for several films yet.  Gensac appeared in two of the subsequent three Gendarme films - Le Gendarme en balade (1970) and Le Gendarme et les Gendarmettes (1982), and her best screen collaboration with de Funès was probably the black comedy Jo (1971) - in which Madame Gensac does indeed end up with a dead body in her living room (and also one buried in the garden).
 
Le Gendarme se marie was the second most popular of the Gendarme films - it attracted 6.8 million (one million less than the first entry in the series, Le Gendarme de Saint-Tropez).  It serves up the familiar mix of visual and scripted gags that fans of Louis de Funès had come to expect once he had become a big star in the mid-1960s.  As well as Gensac, de Funès spars off his co-star Michel Galabru brilliantly - the eternal rivalry of their characters is the best running gag in the series, and here it reaches side-splitting proportions.  At one point, thanks to a computer malfunction, de Funès ends up being promoted above Galabru, and we can guess what happens next.  Alas, de Funès's reign is short-lived and once the tyrant has fallen from his pedestal it is Galabru who has the last laugh.  The French like nothing better than to see their haughty authority figures humiliated. Six months on from this film's release, it would be the turn of President de Gaulle.

Things are livened up no end with some full-throttle action stunts, the best being the car chase at the end of the film, where the mad nun Soeur Clotilde (France Rumilly) makes a welcome re-appearance and proves that anything Jean-Paul Belmondo can do she can do better (and funnier).  On a sadder note, it was whilst performing an action scene near the start of the film that the stuntman doubling for Claude Gensac was killed - it happened when he lost control of his car and crashed into a shop window across the road from the gendarmerie.  This death held up the film's production, which had already been beset with delays caused by the May 1968 public protests.

Again, a fairly mundane script is amply pepped up by de Funès's unflagging flair for improvisational comedy, which allows a fairly mundane scene to be developed into a comedy tour de force.  A case in point is the famous exam scene, in which Cruchot and his immediate superior Gerber sit an exam to decide who will be the superior officer at the Saint-Tropez gendarmerie.  As Galabru assiduously scribbles away, de Funès calmly unloads a ton of stationery from his briefcase and spends the next five minutes or so drawing straight lines in his exercise book, taking great care over the choice of pen and angle of the line.  Logic says the scene cannot possibly work but de Funès makes it utterly hilarious - here we see why he was regarded as the best visual comic of his generation - at least in France.

Film Synopsis

The 1st of July marks the start of the summer holidays in France, and the commencement of a new campaign by the Saint-Tropez gendarmerie to clamp down on dangerous drivers.  Sergeant-chief Cruchot is tasked with leading the offensive, which he does with his customary Napoleonic zeal.  After various mishaps, he goes chasing after a speeding Ford Mustang and cannot believe his good fortune when he finds the car parked outside the police station.  Unfortunately, the car's owner is Josépha, the widow of a highly respected police chief, who has popped into Saint-Tropez to introduce herself to the local gendarmes.  In an instant, Cruchot forgets Josépha's bad driving and starts behaving strangely, as if some magical force appears to have taken possession of him.  Can it be that he has fallen in love?   Josépha certainly seems to have taken a liking to Cruchot, and before he knows it she has befriended his grown-up daughter and has completely re-decorated his apartment.  When an attempt to put Josépha off him fails abysmally, Cruchot yields to the inevitable.  Even gendarmes must marry, eventually...