An average movie

To be honest, I wasn’t really sure what to expect from this flick but, since there was a decent cast involved, I thought I might as well check it out. When I was a kid growing up in France, I used to love Louis de Funès but since I left his country, I rarely see his movies nowadays (I did see ‘Le corniaud’ not so long ago though). Well, from all the comedies I have seen starring this guy, it was probably the weirdest one. For starters, even if the title was pretty cool, it was probably too pretentious for a silly comedy like this one. Above all, even though it was a French comedy, it was actually taking place in Spain during the 17th century and, to make the whole thing even more random, they added for some reason some Spaghetti Western soundtrack. The Queen was also German and spoke in German more than 50% of the time which was surprising because, in French comedies, everybody speak French. Sometimes, they would give her some subtitles but not all the time so, on a regular basis, I couldn’t follow what she was saying but I guess it was supposed to be funny. Concerning Yves Montand, I have to admit that I’m not really familiar with his work but it was interesting to see him in such a daft comedy like this one and he was not bad. However, the big attraction here was obviously de Funès and the guy was, as usual, a total riot. Pretty much like Charles Chaplin with the Tramp or Rowan Atkinson with Mr Bean, de Funès always played every character the same way but, after all these years, I still think he was so hilarious. To be honest, the rest of the movie barely worked at all and, without him, it would have been so boring and even borderline unwatchable. Anyway, to conclude, I don’t think it belongs to the best work of de Funès, I guess it is still worth a look though but probably only if you really like the genre.