The Gendarme Gets Married (1968)

The third descent into the sunburned absurdity of Saint-Tropez, released in 1968, finds Louis de Funes back in the kepi of Ludovic Cruchot for another round of vehicular vendetta and domestic scheming. The premise is disarmingly thin. Cruchot wages war on bad drivers, falls for the widow of a decorated colonel, and sets in motion a courtship that his daughter regards as an act of war. What follows is a farce of misunderstandings, professional jealousy, and a double wedding arranged with the precision of a military exercise.

Viewers arriving with contemporary expectations will find the cupboard bare. The cast is a uniform assembly of French character actors, chosen for comic timing and nothing besides. The women in the story exist to be widowed, wooed, or thwarted, and the screenplay grants them no interiority beyond these functions. Questions of race, sexuality, class, and environment never surface, mostly because the film has no interest in raising them. Its central conflict is a man's promotion and another man's envy, conducted entirely in the register of slapstick.

There is no sermon here, no lesson smuggled into the laughter. Cruchot chases cars, dodges his prospective mother-in-law, and survives an exam for which he is unprepared, all for the sake of a punchline. The film is a product of its moment, content to entertain and nothing more. In our taxonomy it registers as an empty vessel, a comedy that asks nothing of its audience except that they laugh at a man in uniform falling over. We score it accordingly, which is to say we find nothing to score. It is a relic, and a harmless one.

thematic_tags: ["sequel"]