User Reviews

Apart from anything else this is a wonderful chance to savour not only two of the finest French actors in Raimu and Pierre Brasseur but also some of the mainstays of French Cinema, names like Saturnin Fabre, Blanchette Brunoy and Gabrielle Fontan who I sometimes think has been in every French film I love whilst leading lady Sylvia Bataille has a cv that boasts such standout titles as Jenny, Le Crime de Monsieur Lange and Les Portes de la nuit - trivia buffs would no doubt kvel to learn that Bataille, whose screen husband here undergoes psychoanalysis, married one psychoanalyst (Jacques Lacan) and was the mother of another (Laurence Bataille). Both Jean Anouilh and Jean Aurenche worked on the screenplay alongside future director Yves Allegret and pedigrees don't come much more distinguished; this was still a good six years before Aurenche forged an enduring partnership with Pierre Bost and this was only his second screenplay but you wouldn't know it from the assurance on display. This was the era of Screwball Comedy and that same year Preston Sturges wrote Easy Living for Jean Arthur and Ray Milland and if this isn't quite in that league it is, nevertheless, a captivating soufflé' based on the somewhat flimsy, not to say ridiculous, premise that a customs official asking a perfectly logical and totally expected question to whit: have you anything to declare, should render the interrogatee, Pierre Brasseur, impotent - Brasseur was on his honeymoon and the question was posed on a sleeping-car with a border imminent. Out of this Aurenche, Allegret and Anouilh spin a gossamer-thin web of hilarity in which Brasseur's father-in-law, Raimu is a principal player and Saturnin Fabres shrink has to be seen to be believed. All in all this is a delightful romp in which the lover of French Cinema will revel in the cast like a kid let loose in a sweet shop.