French Leave (1967)

D. Blake Edwards
Colour


Ah, Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon. The great fun of men in spats pretending to be girls in flapper dresses; gaping at Marilyn Monroe as she wiggles her way down a train platform; “Nobody’s perfect!” Seriously, who doesn’t love ‘Some Like It Hot’? As close to perfect as any film made by humans is going to get! But it’s curious how some films live long in the memory while others just fade away (this blog of course exists for films that fade away). For instance, for all the high praise lavished upon the Paul Newman and Robert Redford pairing, it’s forgotten that Redford has actually made more movies with Jane Fonda (go on, I bet you can’t name more than one). Similarly the great chemistry of Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon was actually spread across three films. There was the magnificent and utterly unimpeachable ‘Some Like It Hot’, there was the really underwhelming and disappointing ‘The Great Race’ and then there was ‘French Leave’ – which sits more at ‘The Great Race’ end of the spectrum, but – given current events - is really worth taking another peek at.


Here’s the set up. On a promotional trip to France, married Hollywood star Tony Curtis encounters Italian sex kitten Claudia Cardinale and begins to pursue her for an affair. At much the same time, married French President Jack Lemmon (with a truly shocking accent, making Inspector Clouseau sound like he’s authentic to every tortured syllable) is introduced to Cardinale at a party and also tries to seduce her. The two men become aware of each other’s attentions and attempt to thwart each other at every turn, the grandeur of the French presidency put into conflict with the largesse of Hollywood as each vies to make Cardinale his bit on the side.


That’s right, they don’t want the gorgeous, delightful, pouting Claudia Cardinale to be their girlfriend or their wife – each man want hers to be his illicit mistress. The first time I saw this film it made me feel a bit “Uck!” This loud and brash farce where married men try to capture a woman to serve their sexual needs away from their wives, just felt like part of the swinging sixties we were happy to discard. The gender politics could be politely described as antediluvian. But looking at Francois Holland’s travails in the last few weeks has made me revisit ‘French Leave’. It seems that even today – even if you’re the socialist new broom there to clean up the system – it’s the done thing for French Presidents to keep mistresses. Mitterrand of course had his, there were always rumours about Chirac and now Holland finds himself an international scandal. (Not necessarily a national one though, the French press and the French public seem really accepting of this kind of thing. They just give a Gallic shrug and go back to their coffee and baguettes. Imagine, as a comparison, if this was David Cameron with a mistress and Sam Cameron in hospital after an overdose of sleeping pills. The tabloids would sing loud and ebullient praises to the god of mammon from the rooftops, and even Nick Robinson would tear out his remaining hair in excitement). On the other side of the coin nobody thinks movie stars are unimpeachable. It’s downright naïve to believe that Hollywood types don’t have affairs. And so suddenly this film, which I initially dismissed as a sexist relic of a less enlightened time, feels like it could be a free-wheeling docu-drama of NOW where the names have been changed to protect the guilty.


And if I’m honest it’s not that bad. I like Jack Lemmon a lot, but find he mugs too much in broad comedy (and I hate his over the top accent here, but I also hate his equally over the top accent in ‘The Great Race’). I like Tony Curtis a lot, but the laziness in his performance evident here would soon kill his big screen career. And in common with all straight men, I like Claudia Cardinale a lot and will not hear a word against her. So two thirds of the performances could be better, but Blake Edwards does execute the farce quite well. The old money of Versailles against the nouveau riche of Bel Air has good comic potential and everything gets bigger and bigger (if not necessarily that much funnier). It’s a very 1960s movie, which does have a few genuine laughs and has more to say about the morals and peccadillos of certain people today that I initially – in my prudish British way – realised.