The Sucker (1965)

There is a Cadillac, a diamond named the Youkounkoun, a shopkeeper of surpassing naivety, and a criminal mastermind played by Louis de Funès at his most aggrieved. The Sucker sends Antoine Maréchal from Paris to Naples to Bordeaux with a trunk full of heroin, gold, and stolen gems he does not know about, and then watches two rival gangs chase him across the continent. Gérard Oury directs with the tidy efficiency of a man assembling a watch. The jokes land where they are supposed to land. Nobody in the frame is trying to teach us anything.

This is the crucial point for our purposes. A manicurist named Gina attaches herself to the hero purely to make a fiancé jealous. A German hitchhiker named Ursula is passed along like a parcel and later saves his life by sabotaging a car battery. These women are decoration and plot machinery, and the film has the good manners not to pretend otherwise. The cast is uniformly European, the concerns are larceny and geography, and the closest thing to a thesis is that a decent fool will outlast a clever crook. When the gangster boss turns out to be a company director, it registers as a throwaway gag about respectability, not as an indictment of capital.

The picture was the most popular film in France in 1965 and remains among the most watched French films ever made, which tells us something about what audiences wanted before the cinema decided it had a duty to instruct them. There is no sermon here, no consciousness to be raised, no moment where the plot pauses to remind us of our obligations. Just two men in a wrecked car striking up a friendship on the way to the police station. We can classify it, note its total absence of cultural instruction, and quietly envy the era that produced it. A zero, rendered without complaint, is the highest compliment this office knows how to pay.