Rouletabille aviateur (1932)
Directed by Steve Sekely

Film Review

Such was the immense success of Le Mystère de la chambre jaune (1930) and Le Parfum de la dame en noir (1931) that the films' producer Adolphe Osso was bound to continue Rouletabille's adventures with a third film.  Roland Toutain was happy to reprise the role of the elastic-heeled journalist Joseph Rouletabille which had made him an instant star, but Marcel L'Herbier, the director of the first two films, wanted no part in the project.  A promising young Hungarian filmmaker, István Székely, was roped in to direct what became Rouletabille aviateur, the third and (mercifully) last of Toutain's Rouletabille films.  Székely did direct one or two films of note in his own country but he ended up helming B-movies in America (working under the name Steve Sekely) before crowning his career with the sci-fi stinker The Day of the Triffids (1962).  Rouletabille aviateur is probably the worst thing he ever directed.

To describe Rouletabille aviateur as a bad film is putting it mildly.  It is dire, unutterably, unforgivably awful.  The plot owes far more to Tintin than anything Gaston Leroux may have conceived, a formulaic comicbook runaround which leaves no cliché unturned and would have difficulty taxing the intellect of a dim five-year-old.  Toutain does his best but this time everything is against him and he looks like the only sane man in a lunatic asylum (certainly the only one who knows how to act).   It's hard to work out what exactly Székely was doing on this film as it hardly seems to have been directed at all.  The camera is stuck immobile in just about every scene and the actors just seem to wander in and out of shot, heedless of whether they are in a film or not.  Throw in a truly risible musical number (which could not be more out of place if it tried) and some incredibly poor use of back projection and the film ends up looking so cheap and amateurish that you can scarcely believe it was given a commercial release.

Film Synopsis

An aeroplane transporting gold from the Bank of France to Hungary is intercepted by airborne gangsters.  The plane crashes in flames and its precious cargo is loaded aboard a lorry, the ingots concealed in sacks of flour.  Meanwhile, the famous amateur detective Joseph Rouletabille is on holiday in Budapest when he saves a young woman from drowning.  She is Rosy, the daughter of police superintendent Bathory.  Assisted by Rosy, Rouletabille sets out to discover where the crooks have hidden the stolen gold...