Customer Reviews

Le Magnifique

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is a gimmick film, but unlike many such movies it manages to avoid the pitfalls of not moving beyond the initial joke. Francois Merlin is a spy novelist, and uses people and events in his life as fodder for his stories, but also as a means of gaining control of a fictional life that supplants in many ways his actual life. If one thought of it as a French version of "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty," one wouldn't be far wrong. Upon first watching the movie, it isn't quite clear what one is watching. It is obviously a spy flick, but an absurd one. The spy, Bob Saint-Clair, is too polished, too adept. While driving down a highway, he casually pulls out a pistol, and shoots over his shoulder without looking, and a would-be assassin falls from a tree. When his enemies throw a hand grenade at him, he takes a tennis racket and serves it perfectly back to them. And of course, he is dynamite with the women, especially the remarkably beautiful Tatiana. It is only later that we learn that the story we are viewing is being generated by the typewriter of Merlin. As polished as Saint-Clair is, that is how hapless Merlin is. Unable to deal even with repairmen, he is able to wreck his revenge on them by putting them in his story. Of course, we later learn who the model for Tatiana is, when the beautiful American student who is his neighbor, Christine, is first revealed. The rest of the movie is very good, though I have to confess the beginning is my favorite part.

Jean-Paul Belmondo is excellent as Merlin/Saint-Clair. I am perplexed as to why his star career didn't last longer than it did. Jacqueline Bisset is not required to do much beyond look magnificently beautiful, but she manages that wonderfully. Director Phillipe de Broca managed several wonderfully absurd comedies, including JUPITER'S THIGH and KING OF HEARTS. He manages to keep the story on an even keel, never allowing the gimmick to overwhelm the story as a whole.

This is not at all your typical comedy. In tone and style it feels more English than French. Regardless, if you want to try something a little bit different, a whole lot entertaining, and way too neglected, give this a shot.

Belmondo is the French Bogart. In "LE MAGNIFIQUE," directed by the versatile Phillipe De Broca, in 1973, Belmondo is Francois, a reclusive novelist whose fictional Walter Mitty-ish alter ego, the dashing spy hero Bob Saint Claire, overpowers his real life. "Austin Powers" owes a lot to this high-energy farce that winks at, then involves the audience in a wonderful series of set pieces that allow Francois to get even in writing -- and thus on screen -- with all the people that do him wrong in his real life. A glowingly beauteous Jacqueline Bisset co stars.

I ran into this movie on late night television and not having seen the very beginning was following it diligently, sucked up in the absurd torrent of action, when suddenly a maid was coming across the beach with a vacuum cleaner during a battle. Though this doesn't pretend to the gravitas of a Bunuel, taken in the right way it's every bit as surreal and liberating. It weaves in and out of simple frames of interpretation. Just when you think it's a tad too simplistic, it turns around and puts out another layer of interpretation only to then lampoon it. Jacqueline Bisset and Belmondo are both amazing. Watch this in the right state of mind, open to its playful silliness. Would make a good double bill with 'The Stunt Man'; both are surreal, philosophical explorations of action and its relationship to existence.

I was complaining a few reviews back about failed twist endings well here's a perfect example of a successful twist beginning. The film starts off like an absurd James Bond on growth hormones story of Bob Saint-Clair, the world's greatest secret agent, who is so perfect that when he's driving down the road he'll pull out his pistol and randomly shoot into the passing scenery hitting a hiding enemy agent each time.

After about 15 - 20 minutes of Saint-Clair's increasingly wild exploits (and sexual conquests) the writer's cleaning lady comes in...what?! What's going on here? That's right we've been riding along on the imagination of Francois Merlin, the creator of Bob Saint-Clair, the author of his 42 novels and a real life loser.

The tone of Saint-Clair's adventures solely depends on Merlin's current mood in real life. When his editor won't give him an advance the story gets excessively violent, when the plumber makes him mad he throws him in the story and shoots him to death, but when he starts talking to his hot upstairs neighbor (played by Jacqueline Bisset) the story gets happier and more erotic. My favorite part is when Merlin is mad at Saint-Clair so he turns him into a bumbling idiot.

LE MAGNIFIQUE (THE MAGNIFICENT ONE) is not everyone's cup of tea, but I found it to be funny, imaginative, well-executed and oddly enough sweet.

Belmondo clowns up a storm in this amusing and good-hearted farce. In a plot that foreshadows the classic stage musical City of Angels, the picture shifts back and forth between a hack writer and scenes of his tough-guy creation. These film-within-a-film sequences are wildly over the top spy spoofs ala the Matt Helm and Flint movies. Only funny. The writer scenes featuring a rumpled JP and a seriously gorgeous Jacqueline Bisset are similar to early Woody Allen movies. Definitely doesn't overstay it's welcome at ninety minutes.

Action-comedy Le Magnifique aka How to Destroy the Reputation of the Greatest Secret Agent is perhaps the most fun of Philippe De Broca's collaborations with Jean-Paul Belmondo, a 1973 spoof of secret agent movies and pulp novels that clearly exerted a heavy influence on Jean Dujardin and Michel Hazanavicius' OSS 117 spoofs and probably Austin Powers as well. Bob Saint-Clair is the kind of superspy who always gets the girl and never misses the bad guy and, naturally, only operates in the most exotic locations. He's also the creation and altar-ego of terminally broke Francois Merlin, author of 42 novels including The Maltese Pigeon, all written from his apartment in the wrong part of an almost perpetually rainy Paris where he reimagines his publisher, plumber and even a traffic warden as violently despatched villains with no concern other than meeting his deadline so he can pay some bills. That changes when Jacqueline Bisset's student moves in upstairs and starts reading his novels and, worse still, analysing their appeal, and before long he's straying from his winning lowest common denominator formula and undermining his character at every turn as he overanalyses everything tries to write something that will impress her. That's pretty much it for plot, but it's all played with such straight-faced silliness, whether it be a shootout with an army of frogmen interrupted by a cleaning woman vacuuming the beach, an ill-advisedly discarded cyanide pill killing an entire swimming pool of tourists or the walls of an Aztec temple lair running with blood. Yet as silly as it is, it's also a surprisingly accurate film about the perils of the writing process thanks to De Broca and Francis Veber's script, though sadly it starts to fall apart in the last reel as the novel gets too misogynistically absurd while an attempt to contrive a crisis back in the real world to give the film a big finish falls flat. But luckily the rest of the film is so much fun and Belmondo is having such a ball with all the self-parody that even in a dubbed version you can forgive it. And how can you not love a film that begins with a man being killed by a shark in a phone booth?

The French PAL DVD includes an unsubtitled French and dubbed English soundtrack.

Great classic movie. Pure fun and good humour with a lot of action.
It is really funny to see how the film shows what the writter imagines and more, especially how he avenges himself in writing from all the people that do him wrong.
I'm surprised that they haven't made a remake of it.

I am a fan of Claude Bolling's. Bolling is a French musician and a piano virtuoso. Among his works listed by Amazon is a CD entitled "Le Magnifique" containing the score he wrote for the film of the same name. I was so taken by this score that I ordered the movie too, on DVD. I was not disappointed. Jean Belmondo is always a pleasure to watch and this action movie keeps you entertained from beginning to end.

Bob St Clair, espion extraordinaire - James Bond with a French twist - is our hero, flexing his muscles with a modest, self-satisfied smile as he and the beautiful Tatiana fend off the villains, until...
...as he guns down another bunch of baddies on a Rio beach, a maid comes through the action, pushing a vacuum in her carpet-slippers - and we're back to real life, where Francois Merlin is hammering out the story on a crocked old typewriter.
Both Merlin and St Clair are played by Jean-Paul Belmondo - but as Merlin he's unshaven, unwashed, in rumpled grey clothes, a Gauloise dangling out of the corner of his mouth. As Bob St Clair he's tanned, glossy, a lady-killer.
Everything's going wrong for poor Merlin: the plumbing in his grotty flat has given up; he has a mad fancy for the unnoticing Christine, the gorgeous student upstairs (Jacqueline Bisset, who also plays the mysterious Tatiana, besotted by Bob St Clair); his publisher is a bully.
And the disasters of real life infect his story. His typewriter's 'e' key breaks, and the characters lisp their dialogue without it. His publisher becomes the bumbling supervillain...
Very funny, and this Region 1 version is the only one with English subtitles. Every writer should see this film.