Simply A Masterpiece

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

It really made me laugh, but for some moments I was tearing up because I could relate so much.

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

I hoped for a human story. I did not get it.It is about the war. It is not about being heroic in the war. And that is where the script ends. During a long and boring film you get certain flashes: the German girl is treating the French well. The French have bad French gestapovists. The story starts out of nothing. And ends with a promise to have a better second movie. Meaning it ends where it started: nowhere.Dull. Quite obvious. The war is glossed over. More like a silly video game where the hero has to get out of a maze. The war is the excuse to have the hero turn round the maze. The rest is glossed over going to the point of ridicule where the Russians (sounds more like Polish) are unguarded, but the Frenchmen are.This movie is one in a long tradition of French movies with no cultural value. The team can only hope the story gets old enough in order to get some historic value, in the sense "your grandma was your age when this movie was in theaters". At least La Grade vadrouille can be funny.Contact me with Questions, Comments or Suggestions ryitfork @ bitmail.ch

Three years ago - 2009 - the Academic-Pseud axis decided to nominate it as the fiftieth anniversary of the nouvelle vague, based on the year that Godard's Brainless was released. So it gives me extra pleasure to remind these jerks that THIS film, starring a man who had been making films for 29 years in 1959 was far and away the top-grossing film that year whilst Brainless couldn't even beat Hercules Unchained into tenth place, which proves that French cinema-goers chose to see what THEY wanted to see and not what Truffaut THOUGHT they should see. I'd never seen it myself and now that I have I find it holds up very well and has the virtue of being a true story. The basic premise is a combination of the old Army Game - walk about all day with a clipboard in your hand and no one will question what you're really doing - and Hide In Plain Sight. Not to put too fine a point on it Charles Bailly (Fernandel), bored with being a P.O.W. in the more or less open prison of a farm in Germany, decides to walk back home accompanied by a cow, making no attempt to evade German patrols and relying on everyone assuming he has some real purpose other than the real one. Fernandel was, of course, a rubber-faced clown and made his name (and fortune) in that capacity but he had shown he was capable of more dramatic acting in one or two isolated films and he does so again here. Excellent.

I saw this film rather by coincidence, but I'm glad I did. I didn't know the film, and I'm not particularly fond of French movies (not necessarily a hater too), but I started watching and was soon hooked. It's a nice little film about a French prisoner of war who wants to escape Germany with a cow by his side (pretending he's taking the cow someplace). Although this premise may sound a bit thick (or thin, as you wish), it's a thoroughly enjoyable movie, with some heartfelt and funny moments, as well as a few moments of suspense. Fernandel gives an excellent performance, happily with few fringes, as the movie could easily have been turned into a flat cheesy comedy by a lesser actor. A lot of credit goes out the photography, it's superb, I felt like I could hang every frame of the movie on my wall (as is often the case with them old black and white movies). Loved it.

This film by Henri Verneuil showed Fernandel in one of his best roles. Today he is still funny as a cheeky but down-to-earth man with simple needs who is dragged into impossible situations. This is an out-of-the-ordinary "love story" between a man and and a stubborn cow (the animal of course, nothing offensive let me reassure you) called Marguerite...I like the twist at the end after all their little adventures.Charmingly dated but worth seeing again if you are feeling a bit nostalgic !