It's interesting to speculate whether Preston Sturges was familiar with this movie because a few years later he wrote and directed Christmas In July which, like Un Oiseau rare, is kick-started by a contest to find a new slogan, in this case for a lamp and in the Sturges movie for a coffee. Whether Sturges saw it or not it's a safe bet that IMDb would not omit his Screenplay credit as they do her for Jacques Prevert, in fact according to IMDb the actors made it up as they went along for they fail to list ANY writer.
Prevert was arguably the finest of all the French scriptwriters in the first half of the twentieth century with only a handful - Charles Spaak, Henri Jeanson, Jean Aurenche, Pierre Bost - fit to be mentioned in the same breath and here he is in a more playful mood than in his Popular Front screenplay Le Crime de Monsieur Lange. The slogan competition is won by Pierre Larquey but the prize is not cash, as in the Sturges movie, but a holiday at a ski resort. Larquey is a valet and his employer, Max Dearly, is not best pleased and insists on going along and we don't need to come from planet Krytpon to guess that valet and employer are going to be perceived as opposites but Prevert throws us a curve and introduced a Second winner in the shape of Pierre Brasseur, playing a rare romantic role. For those who enjoy basking in the quiet backwaters of early French cinema there is much to savor here with names like Jean Tissier, Marcel Duhamel and Monique Rolland making up the numbers. For some reason this minor gem has fallen into neglect which makes my debt to our Norwegian correspondent all the more weighty.
Prevert was arguably the finest of all the French scriptwriters in the first half of the twentieth century with only a handful - Charles Spaak, Henri Jeanson, Jean Aurenche, Pierre Bost - fit to be mentioned in the same breath and here he is in a more playful mood than in his Popular Front screenplay Le Crime de Monsieur Lange. The slogan competition is won by Pierre Larquey but the prize is not cash, as in the Sturges movie, but a holiday at a ski resort. Larquey is a valet and his employer, Max Dearly, is not best pleased and insists on going along and we don't need to come from planet Krytpon to guess that valet and employer are going to be perceived as opposites but Prevert throws us a curve and introduced a Second winner in the shape of Pierre Brasseur, playing a rare romantic role. For those who enjoy basking in the quiet backwaters of early French cinema there is much to savor here with names like Jean Tissier, Marcel Duhamel and Monique Rolland making up the numbers. For some reason this minor gem has fallen into neglect which makes my debt to our Norwegian correspondent all the more weighty.
