Delusions of Grandeur (1971)

Gérard Oury's Delusions of Grandeur arrives from 1971, an international co-production with a French heart and a Spanish setting, and adapts Victor Hugo's Ruy Blas into something Hugo would not have recognized. Louis de Funès plays Don Salluste, the finance minister of Charles II, a man who collects taxes personally and keeps most of them. Yves Montand is Blaze, the valet. The machinery is pure boulevard farce: disguises, a cockatoo delivering the wrong message, a striptease by a duenna, a bullfighting ring used as a trap. It is a comedy that wants nothing from its audience but laughter, and it gets it.

The film's only social content is economic, and it is old-fashioned in the best sense. Don Salluste robs the poor; Blaze, installed in his place, hands the stolen riches to the peasants and shifts the tax burden onto the nobility. This is Robin Hood arithmetic, a class grievance as ancient as the genre itself, and Oury stages it for laughs instead of instruction. No character turns to the camera to explain the injustice of wealth. The nobles are angry because they are being taxed, which is a joke about nobles, not a manifesto.

Elsewhere the ledger is empty, and honestly so. The women exist to be seduced or mocked, and Doña Juana's disrobing is played for the sight gag it is. Race, climate, and neurodivergence do not enter the frame, and Don Salluste's closing madness is a punchline, not a diagnosis. This is a well-built machine for making a postwar audience laugh, and it still runs. Whether that constitutes cultural progress is a question the film never asks, and never wanted to.