Un cheval pour deux (1962)
Directed by Jean-Marc Thibault

Film Review

Un cheval pour deux was the fourth of five films that Jean-Marc Thibault made in collaboration with his longterm comedy partner Roger Pierre.  Presumably inspired by Claude Autant-Lara's La Traversée de Paris (1956), this idiosyncratic little comedy (typical of Thibault and Pierre's comic style) relies mostly on visual gags although it soon runs out of steam and has great difficulty filling its feature length.  Despite its grim subject, the film is more likely to appeal to children than adults, the humour being more off the inoffensive comicbook kind than the adult black humour you might have expected.

The sequence in which the troublesome horse is supposed be butchered wouldn't have been out of place in a Mack Sennett silent comedy of the 1920s - just about everything in the hero's house other than the horse ends up being destroyed.  It's hardly Thibault and Pierre's finest hour (neither of them was particularly happy with the end result, and it struggled to find an audience) but Un cheval pour deux has its unexpected charms and (if its ending is anything to go by) looks as if it might even have shared a stable with Robert Bresson's Au Hasard Balthazar (1966).  There's a suggestion of a fable here, and you'd almost swear that Thibault and Pierre made this film with the express purpose of putting their compatriots off eating horse meat.

Film Synopsis

On the very day that Paris is liberated by the Allies, 24th August 1944, a young man named Maurice is glad to be released from prison.  You might think that Maurice was put behind bars for serving in the French Resistance, but no, he ended up there simply because he stole a bicycle!  Prison was bad enough, but the world outside seems even worse, as Maurice soon discovers.  Food is so scarce that the queue outside the butcher's shop stretches on for kilometres.  This is what gives Maurice his brainwave.  He plans to steal a horse, butcher it and sell the meat on the black market, like in that film with Bourvil and Jean Gabin (or was that pork?).  Getting hold of the horse proves to be the easy part of the operation.  Turning it into convenient parcels of tantalising fresh meat is far more of a problem, and not even Maurice's childhood friend Roland offers much in the way of help or encouragement...