Le Gorille a mordu l'archevêque (1962)
Directed by Maurice Labro

Film Review

The Gorilla's bite is worse than his bark - or so this monstrously inept thriller would have us believe.  Le Gorille a mordu l'archevêque is the third and by far the weakest in a series of films adapted from the Gorille novels of Antoine-Louis Dominique.  It follows Le Gorille vous salue bien (1958) and La Valse du Gorille (1959), which were both directed (with some flair) by Bernard Borderie.  For this third entry, Roger Hanin returns to the role of the titular Gorilla but the directing baton is passed to Maurice Labro, who looks as if he couldn't care less about the whole thing.  Apart from one or two feisty action sequences (notably a life-and-death tussle on the outside of a moving train which ends horrifically), Labro seems to be directing this film with his eyes closed. And you can't blame him.

Not long before this, Maurice Labro directed a rather good action thriller, Le Fauve est lâché (1959), with Lino Ventura (the original - and best - Gorilla) in the lead role.  The inspired touch that Labro brought to this film is singularly lacking in Le Gorille a mordu l'archevêque, which staggers along like a weary old man before collapsing under the weight of its crass ineptitude.  A ludicrous plot tries, too self-consciously, to make this a parody of its genre, but the humour falls flat and the film ends up looking merely silly and half-baked.

Roger Hanin's lack of acting experience doesn't help matters.  His is a staggeringly wooden performance that makes you wonder how he was ever cast in a film again afterwards.  Not long after this total misfire, Hanin ended up being cast in a virtually identical role in two similar (nearly as bad) thrillers by Claude Chabrol - Le Tigre aime la chair fraîche (1964) and Le Tigre se parfume à la dynamite (1965).  Perversely, these two films were a hit and both Chabrol and Hanin lived to fight another day.

Film Synopsis

Shortly after arriving in the Congo, Georges Pacefons is arrested, his plan to assassinate the French Secretary General apparently thwarted.  But who is Pacefons working for and why do they want to kill this important functionary?  Géo Paquet, an agent of the French security services known as the Gorilla, is assigned to investigate.  By passing himself off as a hired assassin, he manages to infiltrate a consortium headed by a certain Lehurit, which, to protect its own interests, must act to prevent the construction of a new railway line in Africa.  Ouemêlé, an African, sees through Paquet's deception and threatens to expose him...