Les Ringards (1978)
Directed by Robert Pouret

Film Review

As trashy 1970s French crime comedies go they don't come much trashier than Les Ringards, another dismal offering from foley artist turned film director Robert Pouret.  The plot - if you can call it that - would have difficulty filling one side of a matchbox and you can't help wondering how Pouret was able to assemble such an impressive ensemble that includes Georges Wilson, Julien Guiomar, Mireille Darc and Lelouch favourite Charles Gérard.  The sight of the delectable Darc posing nymph-like in her low-cut bikini certainly helps to ease the pain of watching this clumsily thrown together fiasco but the chronic dearth of plot and humour ultimately take their toll, exhuasting the spectator's patience and good will way before the film has staggered towards its midpoint.  The film might have redeemed itself in its last twenty minutes with the much awaited heist, but no such luck.  Just a muddled montage of car chases and third rate stunts, with the principal cast all looking around desperately for something to do.  A more adept filmmaker might have been able to salvage something from the wreck of a script, but in Pouret's hands the film was doomed from the word go. Les Ringards is the cinematic equivalent of a motorway pile-up, only ten times more ugly.

Film Synopsis

Believing them to be dangerous gangsters, police superintendent Garmiche and his deputy Benoit closely monitor the activities of three suspicious looking individuals - Aldo, Charlot and Jeannot.  One is a dancing instructor, one organises boxing matches and the other fancies himself as an intellectual.  The three men are indulging in a harmless spot of car theft when a bank robbery takes place just a few feet away from them.  Naturally they are mistaken for the robbers and before they know it they have been picked up by the police and thrown into jail.  Now it so happens that Garmiche's wife Annie is in favour of judicial reform.  At the request of a minister who shares her liberal views, she arranges for Aldo, Charlot and Jeannot to be set free so that she can help them back onto the straight and narrow.  At least, this is what she wishes her husband to believe.  In fact, what she intends doing is going into partnership with the three petty criminals and organising their next criminal exploit: the hold up of a delivery van...