Don't Look Now... We're Being Shot At!

Gérard Oury puts 3 parties side by side in the Paris of 1942: Stanislas Lefort, the chief conductor at the opera, Augustin Bouvet, a house painter, and the crew who bailed out of a British bomber shot down over the city. The meeting point is the hammam of the Paris mosque. The escape ends with gliders lifting off, and a cross-eyed German soldier accidentally ruining the machine gun fire aimed at them. Oury had worked with the same pairing a year earlier on Le Corniaud, and Bourvil and Louis de Funès are matched again here. Berlioz sits beside Georges Auric in the music because the opera sequence draws on his work. Shooting went well beyond the Billancourt stages; a plaque in Meursault still marks the filming. The record needs care. This was the top film at the French box office in 1966, reportedly selling almost twice the tickets of the runner-up, Doctor Zhivago. It stayed the most-watched French film in France for over 40 years, and on the list that counts every nationality it now sits 5th. A good fit if you want chases and physical business rather than verbal wit, and 2 comic leads built to clash. Not for viewers looking for the weight of the occupation years; Oury frames the whole thing as comedy from the start.