The Gendarme Takes Off (1970)

Jean Girault returns to the Gendarmerie of Saint-Tropez for a fourth time and finds his gendarmes pushed into retirement by a younger breed. Ludovic Cruchot now resides in his wealthy wife's castle, where he feuds with the butler over the right to perform simple household tasks. This is the film's idea of a crisis. A man of action reduced to polishing silverware in a provincial chateau, bored nearly to death, which the screenplay treats as a genuine tragedy of the idle rich.

Salvation arrives through amnesia. One of the old brigade suffers an accident and loses his memory, so the others reunite, kidnap him, and drag him on a tour of their former patrol routes in the hope that nostalgia will restore what blunt trauma removed. They steal back their uniforms. They turn Saint-Tropez upside down. Along the way they interrupt juvenile delinquents attempting to mount a nuclear warhead on a homemade rocket, a sequence played entirely for slapstick and carrying no environmental subtext whatsoever. The generation gap with the local hippies is mined for easy laughs, not sermons.

Classified against the modern markers, the film returns a clean sheet. The cast is uniformly white, the women occupy traditional comedic stations, and the wealthy wife in her castle exists to generate butler-based farce, not a critique of capital. Amnesia here is a plot engine, not a condition deserving of compassion. The whole enterprise is a nostalgic romp through the characters' own memories, which is not the same as revising history. There is no lecture, no lesson, no message. Just a man in a stolen uniform, shouting at youths. The sommelier finds nothing to swirl.