The MacMahonian does keep in mind the need to diversify from Tinseltown fare. Circumstances oft-alluded to previously limit this desideratum, which is fine because I love Tinseltown fare. Today, however, and again courtesy of the Institut Français de Chine, for something not that different: Philippe de Broca's L'Homme de Rio.
L'Homme de Rio was the 7th feature film directed by Philippe de Broca, often associated with the Nouvelle Vague, essentially for having been assistant director to a couple of early Chabrol and Truffaut films. Reportedly traumatized by his experience as war correspondent in Algeria, de Broca decided to devote his life to directing only fluff. His talent was, to put it kindly, fair to middling. Script quality, cast talent and the general production standards of the coeval French film industry sometimes prevented him from ruining the films he directed.
L'Homme de Rio follows the adventures of Adrien Dufourquet (Jean-Paul Belmondo) off duty air force pilot visiting his girlfriend Agnés (Françoise Dorléac) in Paris, only to witness her being abducted by (turns out) Brazilian gangsters, the chase of whom, involving a plot to steal pre-columbian statues which hold the secret to a hidden treasure, take Adrien to Brazil an back (to France) in a series of extremely improbable action mishaps in the course of which our hero both rescues is girlfriend and foils the gangster's plot.
Shot at a time when Brazil was coming back to fashion, courtesy of the then ongoing construction of Brasilia, most modernist of capitals, of the emergence of the Bossa Nova and also of the Jet Set as symbol for affluence and sophistication, as sung e.g. by Frank Sinatra in Come Fly with Me (Billy May, 1958), influenced by 30's Hollywood serials and 50s & 60s Franco-Belgian action bandes dessinées, L'Homme de Rio was inter alia one of the reported benchmarks of Steven Spielberg's Indiana Jones franchise (1981-present).
To say that the script's preposterousness is redeemed by the fim's cheeky cartoony immediacy would be an understatement, as Belmondo hops on planes without tickets, spends 2 or 3 transatlantic days without apparently needing food, drink, sleep or personal hygiene as he cavorts from running cars to sailing boats to flying planes and occasionally successfully chases fleeing motorcades by energetically running after them. De Broca's limited talent does bar L'Homme from being the exhilarating roller coaster ride it would have been in the hands of, say, Richard Donner, but the sheer outrageousness of the proceedings and loads of cliché touristic attraction Brazil footage do considerably compensate.