Don't Look Now... We're Being Shot At! (1966)

The French have a gift for making catastrophe look like an afternoon errand. Gérard Oury's La Grande Vadrouille, which traveled abroad under a different and more excitable name, drops a Royal Air Force bomber over Paris in 1942 and scatters its crew into the reluctant care of a house painter and an opera conductor. The ensuing journey toward the demarcation line involves stolen German uniforms, wine casks, a puppet theatre, and a glider launch that no aviation authority would sanction. The picture was the most popular French release of 1966, with over seventeen million admissions, and it remains among the most attended films in that country's history. It is a machine built for laughter, and it works.

Examined through the lens of contemporary cultural expectation, the film offers nothing at all. The cast is uniformly European and uniformly pale. Women appear as a puppeteer and a nun, both helpful, neither the subject of any argument about their place in the world. The Germans are buffoons, the British are stiff, the French are resourceful, and nobody pauses to interrogate the arrangement. A cross-eyed soldier saves the day by missing his shot, a gag played for pure slapstick and nothing else. There is no commentary on capital, no environmental conscience, no interior life examined for its difference. The war is a backdrop, not a sermon.

This is not a deficiency. It is a timestamp. The film belongs to a comedic tradition that asked only whether the joke landed, and the joke lands with the regularity of a metronome. We have spent decades since teaching our comedies to mean something, and the results have been mixed. Here the meaning is simply that a nun driving a wagon full of fugitives is funny, and that a conductor and a painter bickering in German uniforms is funnier still. The sommelier's verdict: a clean vintage, untouched by the preoccupations we now track, and entirely at peace with that.