Bizarre, Bizarre

In London the botany professor Molyneux secretly writes crime novels and publishes them under another name. His relation the bishop considers murder fiction immoral and denounces it at public meetings. A dinner turns into catastrophe: the professor's wife disappears, the neighbours assume he has killed her, and he has to hide inside the crowd investigating his own murder. The subject is not the killing but how absurd the lies people will build to protect their respectability. Nobody wants to tell the truth; everyone has something separate to conceal and the lies stack on one another. The form is complete comic chaos. Jacques Prévert's screenplay runs on wordplay, and one line survived into French itself: the bishop's repeated bizarre has been in everyday speech ever since. It was not liked on release and failed commercially. In later years it became one of Marcel Carné's best-loved films and is now counted among the classics of French comedy. Michel Simon plays the professor, Louis Jouvet the bishop and Françoise Rosay his wife. Jean-Pierre Aumont is also in the cast. Who it is for: viewers who like classic French comedy and humour built on language. Who it is not for: anyone watching with subtitles; a significant part of the jokes lives inside the language and does not survive translation.