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Credits
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Summary
After several failed suicide attempts, the depressive
young millionaire Arthur Lempereur agrees to go on a tour of the Far East
with his valet Léon, his fiancée and her parents. Learning
that he is bankrupt, Arthur decides to hang himself, but is talked out
of it by his accountant Mr Goh, who makes him a deal. Arthur's death
will be assured if he agrees to sign an insurance contract, in which a
million dollars will be paid to his fiancée and to Mr Goh, if he
dies within the next month. When unknown strangers start taking pot
shots at him, Arthur soon regains his enthusiasm for life. He and
Léon embark on a desperate mission to try to find Mr Goh to persuade
him to annul the contract...Review
After the spectacular success of L’Homme de Rio,
Philippe de Broca was commissioned to direct a similar frenetic action
comedy, again with Jean-Paul Belmondo in the lead role. De Broca
freely adapted a novel by Jules Verne to create a film in the same vein
as L’Homme de Rio, but with a bigger budget and with far more liberal
use of comic stunts.
Les Tribulations d'un chinois en Chine is an indefatigable action farce from start to finish, seemingly exploding with some genuinely breathtaking stunts set against some equally breathtaking scenery. Filmed in such exotic locations as Hong Kong, Kuala Lumpar, Bombay and the jungles of Malaysia, you get the impression that no expense was spared (and it wasn’t). This is big budget comic book comedy à la Stephen Spielberg (who himself was allegedly influenced by de Broca’s films), a uniquely Broca-esque melange of James Bond and Tintin. This time, de Broca even manages to hire a real-life Bond girl to partner his lead actor, the stunning Ursula Andress, more than justifying the inclusion of a shameless Bond parody at the end of the film. There is nothing at all which is remotely profound or believable in this film. It is an unashamed comic diversion, pure escapism, in which increasingly O.T.T. comic situations falling thick and fast and stunt actors (which include Belmondo) seemingly engage in a battle to the death to out-do each other. For the viewer, it is an exhausting but thoroughly entertaining romp, although you may feel that you are sitting through a video recording of Around the World in Eighty Days with the play control stuck on "fast-forward". © James Travers 2000 Essay
Sometimes one has to step
back to appreciate just what exists of value in a filmmaker or a film that
one has been quick to disparage. I have been slamming Philippe de Broca
for years on so many fronts it's hard to keep track. He's commercial. His
films are trivial entertainments. They are arch and strained. They go on
too long for the slight things that they are. I believe all of this still.
In the 1960s found his antiwar fable King of Hearts (Le roi de
coeur, 1966), which had a deliriously long run at some Boston movie
house, silly. Horrors, I thought: de Broca's "getting serious."
De Broca is still at work. The onetime assistant to Claude Chabrol and François Truffaut is near seventy now, his career having settled into work for French television. It's time to be kind, at least, kinder. He made "trivial entertainments"? Well, yes, and because he could be good at making them some of them are rousingly, if trivially, entertaining. Les tribulations d'un Chinois en Chine (The Tribulations of a Chinaman in China; Up to His Ears) suffers from all the shortcomings that afflict all of de Broca's films. It's also, if one is in a receptive mood, funny and exciting. And it has Jean-Paul Belmondo in his agile, endearing stunt-performing mode. The film is based on the novel by Jules Verne. Indeed, it's the very best cinematic Jules Verne apart from Karel Zeman's brilliant Czech film Vynález zházy (1958), which draws from a number of Verne's novels, principally, Face au drapeau. Without doubt, whatever its shortcomings so typical of de Broca, Les tribulations d'un Chinois en Chine is vastly superior, for example, to Michael Anderson's flatfooted Around the World in 80 Days (1956), the star-studded monstrosity for which producer Mike Todd won an Oscar. (The year of John Ford's The Searchers, mind you, which wasn't nominated.) The requisite line-treading between impossibility and possibility is exhilaratingly within de Broca's grasp; you won't find this in Around the World. De Broca's may not be the best film on the block, then, but there are others that are far worse. De Broca and Belmondo had already teamed for Cartouche (1962) and L'homme de Rio (1964; the more mythical title The Man from Rio became in the States the sarcastic That Man from Rio), thus establishing the forte of their partnership as action-comedy. (Subsequently the two reteamed for Le Magnifique (1973), L'Incorrigible (1975) and Amazone (1990).) Indeed, Les tribulations is very much in the same vein as L'homme de Rio, if a bit more frantically and farcically so; Belmondo's character there, Adrien, asks rhetorically of his girlfriend, "What's next? Are we going to China?" Les tribulations takes de Broca and his star to China--to Hong Kong, to be exact--for a series of breathless adventures that keep Belmondo's character, Arthur this time, constantly fleeing a seemingly ubiquitous conspiracy to have him killed. (It's worth noting that Steven Spielberg's 1981 Raiders of the Lost Ark generously plagiarizes from both these de Broca-Belmondos, but substituting, disadvantageously, production-finish for their lightness of touch.) The premise is nothing if not farfetched. Living on a boat, Arthur Lempereur is a bored billionaire whose attempts at suicide always fail. In Hong Kong, his Chinese attorney, Mr. Goh (Valéry Inkijinoff, impeccable), helps secure the boy a few-day insurance policy that upon his death will bring to each of his two beneficiaries, his fiancée and Mr. Goh himself, a fortune. Since nothing would be paid on the policy in the event of suicide, Arthur agrees that Mr. Goh should arrange for his murder, to come as a surprise when the boy is least expecting it. But, anxious in the extreme, Arthur is now always expecting it and, besides, the fan dancer whose act he has caught, Alexandrine, has given him new cause to live. Arthur wants out of the death-arrangement, therefore, but Mr. Goh seems intent on getting his share of the fortune. Two suspicious men dogging Arthur turn out to be (inept) bodyguards paid by the insurance company to protect their most vulnerable client, but meanwhile the boy's fiancée's greedy parents are hiring people left and right to score a hit against him. The lightness, the speed, the dazzling stunts and special effects, the brilliant sense of an endless chase all contribute to the spirit of the thing, and while one may get a bit tired before the film reaches its merry conclusion--I know I did--a good deal of the transport delights. The film's trump, of course, is Belmondo. I know, I know: Belmondo is one of the greatest actors of all time, in films by Louis Malle, Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Melville, among others. I'd much rather be watching him in one of those. Nevertheless, breezy commercial entertainments were the bread-and-butter of his career, and he is truly astonishing in this role, for both his comic skill and that limber athletic body of his. The former boxer delivers an expert series of farcical jabs and amazing leaps and tumbles. Ursula Andress plays Alexandrine,
appearing in what Dr. No (Terence Young, 1963) had made her trademark
bikini. In the 1980s, seemingly nearing extinction, Andress became something
of an industry joke for taking up with a "boy-toy," a young, dreadful actor
named Harry Hamlin. (Hamlin ended up on American TV, in L.A. Law, having
found a niche hospitable to his smarmy incompetence.) To see Andress young
again, and gorgeous, as she is in Les tribulations d'un Chinois en Chine,
is to redeem one's memory of her from the sad pathos of her later attempt
to recapture her simple magic in the arms of Rosemary's baby.
© Dennis Grunes 2003 |
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