Now Where Did the Seventh Company Get to?

In June 1940, as the French front collapses, a reconnaissance party tries to find out where its own company has gone. Three soldiers get lost in the woods, run straight into the Germans and pass through the war without ever understanding it. The film is not interested in war. It is interested in the absurdity of a rout: nobody can get an order, nobody knows where anyone is, and the three men survive simply by wandering. Its humour is built on incompetence, not heroism. The form is noisy French comedy: three characters permanently bickering, repeated catchphrases and chases through the trees. Robert Lamoureux wrote and directed. The film was a large box-office success in France and produced two sequels; through television repeats it became a classic watched across generations. That local vein is also why it is barely known abroad. Pierre Mondy, Jean Lefebvre and Aldo Maccione star. Who it is for: viewers who like French popular comedy and light treatments of the war years. Who it is not for: anyone who finds humour tied to cultural context hard going. Most of the jokes rest on the French army and idiom of the period and are largely lost in translation.