Les Malabars sont au parfum (1966)
Directed by Guy Lefranc

Film Review

Such was the immense popularity of Georges Lautner's Les Barbouzes (1964) that French cinemas were inundated with daft spy thriller spoofs for the next half a decade, most massively inferior to the now classic comedy that set the ball rolling.   Les Malabars sont au parfum is a middling entry in this formulaic sub-genre, the inherent silliness of its plot redeemed by the accumulated talent of the comedy ensemble that it throws at us.  Francis Blanche pretty well steals the film as the inept Soviet agent (a role he was pretty well wedded to at this time in his career), with Darry Cowl (as a fumbling Agent 001) and Henri Salvador (as an apparently lobotomised gendarme) each bagging a fair quota of laughs on their own account.

Director Guy Lefranc specialised in popular comedies of this kind and had a knack of keeping audiences entertained, even if the gags were (as they are here) painfully well-worn and original ideas in chronically short supply.  After a promising first half, Les Malabars sont au parfum hastily degenerates into a predictable run-around as the screenwriters methodically work their way through the schoolboys' compendium of spy gags.  It's tempting to think that the scene at the end, where a cow is hoisted aloft by a helicopter, was inspired by Fellini's La Dolce vita, the statue of Christ replaced with something just as holy to commercial film producers, a vache à lait...

Film Synopsis

Convinced that her soon-to-be married nephew Michel is harbouring a dark secret, Aunt Berthe hires a private detective to discover what he is hiding.  Michel's secret turns out to be a benign one: he has found a way to get a cow to deliver two hundred litres of milk a day, and naturally the Minister for Agriculture is interested in his discovery.  To ensure Michel comes to no harm, the latter supplies him with a personal bodyguard, in the form of the ravishing blonde Valérie, and insists that he takes his impending honeymoon in the suburbs of Paris, and not Venice as planned.  It is not long before the American and Soviet secret services have got wind of Michel's invention and sent their best available agents to kidnap the scientist...