Comedy and Popular Cinema

The history of French film told by critics concentrates on poetic realism, the New Wave and festival prize-winners. The history told by the box office is different. For most of the postwar period, what the French public actually went to see was comedy: broad farces, gentle satires and star vehicles that rarely win prizes abroad. This chapter follows that tradition, from the great comic actors of the 1950s and 1960s to the record-breaking hits of recent decades, and asks why the gap between critics and audiences is so wide. Titles, dates and attendance figures are given from general knowledge and flagged where they should be checked.

Two Histories

French cinema has long had two tracks. One is the art-house tradition of Chapters 3 to 5, admired abroad and written about by critics. The other is the popular tradition, which fills cinemas at home and often travels badly. The two sometimes meet, but the audience for a Cannes prize-winner and the audience for the year's biggest comedy are often quite different.

Comic Stars of the Postwar Years

Jacques Tati

Tati stands slightly apart from the rest. He made only a few feature films, each carefully constructed, in which the comedy comes from the way people and machines move in a space, not from jokes. His character, Monsieur Hulot, a tall figure with a pipe, hat and raincoat, wanders through modern life without understanding it.

• Les Vacances de M. Hulot (1953). A seaside holiday. It made Tati and Hulot famous.
• Mon oncle (1958). A satire on modern houses and gadgets; it won an Oscar for foreign-language film (check).
• Playtime (1967). An enormous production built around a vast set, nicknamed Tativille, which cost so much that it ruined him financially (check). It was a failure on release and is now widely admired.

Tati also left an unproduced script about an old stage magician in a world that no longer wants him. It was made into an animated film, The Illusionist (2010), by Sylvain Chomet, and is set partly in Edinburgh (check), a rare case of a French film tradition travelling to the city of this course's author.

Bourvil, de Funès and the 1960s

The comedies of the 1960s were crowd-pleasers, and they defined popular French cinema for a generation.

• Le Gendarme de Saint-Tropez (1964). The first of a series of films, directed by Jean Girault, in which de Funès played a fussy police officer in a seaside resort (check the number of films).
• Fantômas parodies. A trilogy in the 1960s that took the old Feuillade serial (Chapter 3) and turned it into comedy.
• La Grande Vadrouille (1966). A comedy about the Second World War in which Bourvil and de Funès help British airmen escape from occupied Paris. It was an enormous success and was for more than forty years the most-seen French film in France (check the figures).

It is notable that a comedy about the Occupation became the most popular film in the country, at a time when the serious memory of the war was still difficult (compare the Chapter 4 discussion of how the Occupation was remembered). Laughter allowed the French to talk about it.

Records of the 1990s to the 2010s

The tradition continued, and a handful of films set new attendance records.

• Les Visiteurs (1993). A medieval knight and his servant are thrown into the modern day; a very big hit in France (check the figures).
• Bienvenue chez les Ch'tis (2008). A comedy about a postal worker transferred to the north of France, played for laughs over regional stereotypes and accents. It was the most-attended French film in France, passing La Grande Vadrouille (check).
• Intouchables (2011). A comedy-drama about a wealthy man with a disability and his carer. One of the biggest worldwide successes in French film, and also criticised for how it handled class and race (check).

Other popular titles include the Astérix adaptations, the ensemble comedies of the group called Le Splendid, and the sharp farces of Francis Veber (check).

Why the Gap?

• Language and reference. Comedy depends on accents, wordplay and local habits that do not translate well.
• Critical snobbery. Critics have often looked down on popular comedy, and audiences have ignored the critics.
• Different purposes. One tradition wants to explore the medium and the other to entertain.
• Both are French. A complete history needs both, which is why the course gives popular cinema a chapter of its own.

The same gap exists elsewhere. Compare the German pattern in German Film & Television 9, where a parody of westerns drew more cinema-goers than most prize-winners.

Exercises

Next chapter: Le Polar & the Cinéma du Look, which follows the French crime film and the stylish directors of the 1980s.