A poor swansong for Gabin made worse by a dire DVD

It's a sad fact that many of the greats bow out with especially weak films, and sadly that was the fate that befell Jean Gabin with 1976's L'Année Sainte, an increasingly tiresome comedy that sees Gabin and Jean-Claude Brialy as crooks masquerading as priests en route to Italy to recover their hidden loot. Unfortunately they don't get further than the plane, which is promptly hijacked, leading to... well, not a lot either in the way of comedy or drama. It's such a particularly weak effort that you can only guess that the main attraction for Gabin was that he got to sit down for most of the shoot. Making matters worse is that the US DVD is terrible. Poor picture quality is the least of its problems - it's the subtitles, or rather the frequent lack of them, that really cripple this release. Half the lines go untranslated, leaving sentences unfinished and non-French speakers lost. Those that do appear aren't exactly too convincing either, with no punctuation and words like guy mistranslated as gay, others a clumsy mixture of words and stray letters or numbers and whole sentences often becoming nonsensical. One to avoid.