Les Bricoleurs (1962)
Directed by Jean Girault

Film Review

Before he began his long a fruitful collaboration wth comedy giant Louis de Funès, Jean Girault directed a number of inferior comedies, scripted by his other long-term associate Jacques Vilfrid.  As dreadful as some of these are, most were enormously popular - in fact Girault already had a string of box office hits under his belt even before he began working with de Funès.  Most of Girault's early films featured two other well-liked comedians, Francis Blanche and Darry Cowl, who tended to work better as a double act in films rather than individually (doubly so in the case of Cowl).

After Girault's Les Pique-assiette (1960) and Les Livreurs (1963) had proved massively popular with French cinema audiences, Blanche and Cowl were let down on the director's third film with an asinine script that resorts to the most puerile kind of humour, and with next to nothing in the way of a plot to hold the film together.  The presence of Elke Sommer (near the start of her career) and legendary comedienne Jacqueline Maillan help to pep the film up a little but Vilfrid and Girault's idea of comedy soon becomes wearisome.  Without a decent script to guide and restrain their inimitable brand of lunacy, Blanche and Cowl are totally unbearable even before the second reel has run its course.  Is there anyone who can explain why the film attracted an audience of 1.5 million?

Film Synopsis

Edouard and Félix are a pair of bungling estate agents who have no aptitude for the job whatsoever.  Tired of their mishaps, their employer is ready to dismiss them but he gives them one last chance.  They can keep their jobs providing they sell a house in a remote spot to a wealthy English woman.  The duo are busy showing their client around the house when they find its owner lying dead in the hall with a knife in his back.  Having managed to conceal the body from their client, by moving it from one hidey hole to another as she views the house, Edouard and Félix find they have another problem.  Unless they can find the owner's written agreement to sell the house the sale cannot go ahead.  It's time for them to change their métiers and become amateur sleuths...