Jacques Dufilho Movies

A wealthy French matron drives her captors crazy when she is kidnapped and help for ransom. Mathilde (Jacqueline Maillan) is married to a rich husband of questionable virtue. A dimwitted duo of aspiring crooks get more than they bargained for by the abduction of the woman. A French Air Force pilot is mistaken for a Russian cosmonaut when he accidently hits the eject button on his plane's control panel. ~ Dan Pavlides, All Movie Guide

A wife and her sculptor husband struggle to get by in this situation comedy. Delphine (Michele Mercier) receives word she will inherit a sizeable fortune provided she is a widow. Her love for her husband Antoine (Claude Rich) is soon overtaken by her lust for money. A Jewish charitable organization will get the money if the husband lives. He goes to a local gangster for protection while his wife contacts a mob hitman to murder the man. In the shadows, the couple consorts with gangsters as they jockey for position to collect the coveted coin. ~ Dan Pavlides, All Movie Guide

A super spy must simultaneously help some secret agents and the daughter of a mad professor in this James Bond spoof. The professor is pursued by Russian and US agents because he has invented a weapon that neutralizes nuclear arms. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

Jerome (Jacques Dufilho) is a policeman who finds himself stranded on a Spanish island in this plodding comedy. Waiting for days for an outgoing plane for Brussels, Jerome deals with his isolation and loneliness and has reoccurring visions of a beautiful woman (Claudia Bremer). ~ Dan Pavlides, All Movie Guide

Lady L (Sophia Loren) is an 80-year-old woman who recalls her amorous adventures in flashback in this light sex comedy. While working as a laundress, Lady L falls for the gambler and anarchist Armand (Paul Newman), who gets mixed up with an inept group trying to assassinate the senile Prince Otto (Peter Ustinov). She ends up marrying the suave aristocrat Dicky (David Niven) in this entertaining but uneven feature. ~ Dan Pavlides, All Movie Guide

Friedrich Durrenmatt's misanthropic theatrical piece The Visit has never been totally successful in any production, not even in the original Broadway presentation starring Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne. The film version keeps this failure record consistent. Ingrid Bergman plays a fabulously wealthy woman who returns to her impoverished home town. Years earlier, she had been driven from town in disgrace after sleeping with solid citizen Anthony Quinn. She now offers a deal to the city elders: Bergman will alleviate the city's financial difficulties--in exchange for Quinn's life. The original play ended with the lynching of the seducer; the film ends with Bergman halting the execution, proclaiming that by allowing Quinn to live, the townsfolk will be forced to feel the pangs of guilt over what they might have done for the rest of their lives. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Director Jacques Baratier's Sweet and Sour is an independently produced project with a surprising amount of European movie-industry input. Guy Bedos, a Brando wannabe, plays one of several young French cineastes who take to the streets to make improvisational movies. The "cinema verite" quality of the film is somewhat undercut by the presence of major stars: Anna Karina, Simone Signoret, Jean-Paul Belmondo, Monica Vitti, Claude Brasseur, and many others. After several "spontaneous" vignettes -- a street tennis game, a striptease lesson, a West Side Story style gang rumble -- Guy Bedos announces he will go to Hollywood to film the life of Voltaire. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

In this gentle anti-war comedy, a class of French schoolboys divides into two factions who begin to battle each other, with the victors claiming the buttons off the clothes of the vanquished. One day, some of the boys pull a strategic coup by running into battle naked, therefore leaving their enemies nothing to steal. However, after this stunning victory, one of their number turns traitor to the other side, helping them plot a secret attack that leaves the recent champions in defeat. The informer is eventually found out and punished for his crimes, so he takes the matter to a higher authority and tells his parents he's been beaten up by bullies. Soon Mom and Dad are making trouble for their son's schoolmates, with the culprits facing a stay in juvenile hall. La Guerre des Boutons was written and directed by Yves Robert, who had a distinguished career both in front of and behind the camera in the French cinema. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

While there is an element of science fiction to this political satire about Latin American dictatorships, that element is primarily used to promote the storyline and the message, and not as a value in itself. In a make-believe Spanish-speaking country of the Americas, a dictator (Zbigniew Cybulski) rules with the usual degree of corruption but as it turns out, his wife is the one who gives most of the orders. Two story strands are then woven together: a scientist has invented a way to replicate objects and, lo and behold, he discovers he can make a robotic duplicate of the dictator's wife. Meanwhile, an ardent, left-leaning revolutionary who happens to be a dead ringer for the dictator ends up taking over the tyrant's role when he is assassinated. So one has a robotic wife and a fake dictator now running a country which is none the wiser. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide

Director Georges Lautner and screenwriter Jacques Robert worked on a series of "Monocle" films together, starting with this tongue-in-cheek espionage thriller. Paul Meurisse launched his career with this film, as Dromard, the French secret agent with the black monocle. In this story, a somewhat wacko nobleman is anxiously sitting out the expected arrival of the former leader of the Nazi youth corps. The word gets out to the international spy ring, and soon German and Russian agents are snooping around, hoping to be there when the man arrives. But in the end, they might as well be waiting for Godot. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide