That Man from Rio

The airman Adrien Dufourquet gets eight days' leave and lands in Paris to find his fiancée Agnès has been abducted. A Maltec statuette was stolen from a museum the same day. Adrien gets on a plane and follows them to Rio. What comes next runs on one breath: the streets of Rio, Brasília still under construction, the Amazon, and a treasure that three statuettes together will locate. The film plays the adventure genre without taking it seriously. Belmondo does his own stunts, and the hero remains a man who is tired, hungry and running out of leave. Everything in it is material we would later see in the Indiana Jones films: the golden idol, the collapsing cave, a beam of light passing through three jewels, and a boy who helps the hero. The small shoeshine Sir Winston is treated as the forerunner of Short Round. Philippe de Broca directed. Jean-Paul Belmondo plays Adrien and Françoise Dorléac plays Agnès. It was nominated for best original screenplay at the 37th Academy Awards. In France it sold over four million eight hundred thousand tickets and was the fifth most watched film of the year. Who it is for: anyone who likes sixties adventure comedy and Belmondo. Who it is not for: anyone looking for logic. The plot runs on coincidence, Brazil is used as scenery, and the woman spends the film waiting to be rescued.