That Man from Rio (Les Films Ariane, Les Artistes Associées, Dear Film Produzione, 1964)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Yesterday (Tuesday, August 13) Turner Classic Movies did one of their “Summer Under the Stars” day-long salutes to a movie star with a day devoted to French actor Jean-Paul Belmondo (1932-2021), who had made his mark on the screen playing a small-time gangster who consciously modeled himself on Humphrey Bogart in Jean-Luc Godard’s first film as a director, Breathless (1960). As part of their Belmondo marathon they showed a really strange comedy he made in 1964, That Man from Rio, a sort of James Bond spoof which I first encountered under unusual auspices in Mexico in 1967. My mother had spent the previous summer in Mexico and decided that for the summer of 1967 she, my brother and I would live in a small fishing village in Jalisco called Ajijíc. Ajijíc had a small outdoor movie theatre and every week they’d put on a screening that always double-billed a Mexican film and a foreign film. Most of the foreign films were from the U.S. and therefore in English (with Spanish subtitles), but this one was in French with Spanish subtitles, and between my limited French and my limited Spanish I was barely able to piece together what was going on. I’d been reminded of this in an equally quirky way: I’d been to the Mariachi Continental concert in Balboa Park August 6 and among the songs they performed was “Cucurrucucú Paloma,” which I remembered as the title song from a 1965 Mexican movie starring singer Lola Beltrán which we’d seen in Ajijíc.

The film was directed by Philippe de Broca, who seems to have been Belmondo’s go-to director when he wanted to do comedy, and written by a committee including de Broca himself, Jean-Paul Rappeneau, Ariane Mnoushkine and Daniel Boulanger. (I looked him up to see if he was any relation to the French composers Nadia and Lili Boulanger, but imdb.com didn’t list any connection.) According to the imdb.com page on That Man from Rio, Steven Spielberg cited it as an inspiration for Raiders of the Lost Ark and the subsequent Indiana Jones movies, and Jean-Paul Belmondo did his own stunts. I frankly find the latter very hard to believe, since de Broca and his co-writers put Belmondo’s character through some hair-raisingly dangerous predicaments – including dangling him off rafters made of crudely fastened wood, and having him tightrope his way across long metal cables several stories above the ground – I was sure they had a stunt double (or several) for him. That Man from Rio actually starts in the Musée des Hommes in Paris, in which a couple of swarthy Latin types break in to steal a foot-high terra-cotta statue of an idol from the Maltecs, a now-extinct tribe in ancient Brazil. When the museum’s elderly security guard catches them, one of them shoots him with an air gun that emits a poisoned dart. Presumably the poison is an old Maltec one no one alive remembers how to make. Through a rather clunky exposition scene we learn that the stolen statue was one of three, they were discovered by a team of European anthropologists a decade or so earlier, and the archaeologist who owned one of the other statues was murdered for it, and the statue disappeared. Later we get a grim scene in which the film’s principal villain, Professor Norbert Catalán (Jean Servais), murders the possessor of the third statue in the group and steals it.

In case you were wondering – as I was – where Jean-Paul Belmondo fits in to all this, he’s French Army Private Adrien Dufourquet, who along with his friend Lebel (Roger Dumas) has been given a one-week leave to Paris in which he plans to spend most of it with his girlfriend, Agnès Villermosa (Françoise Dorléac). Unfortunately, Agnès is the daughter of one of the three men on that Brazilian expedition lo those many years ago, and he was murdered for his statue back then. Adrien sees Agnès being kidnapped by Professor Catalán and the two Latino thugs we saw in the opening scene. He chases after her in a series of conveyances he quickly loses control of – his ineptitude at giving chase becomes a running gag in the film – only he barely misses her when the baddies get her onto an airliner. Adrien is able to sneak onto the plane – this was well before the days of security screenings, and airport security in this film is so lax Adrien is literally able to buy a ticket to the flight with a vending machine – only he finds himself on his way to Rio de Janeiro. Since he has no passport, the flight authorities say they’re going to detain him at the airport and presumably deport him back to France, but he’s able to escape that fate simply by dashing out of the parked plane when no one is looking, then stealing a cart used to tow the planes into or out of landing position. The rest of the film is one big long chase scene in which Agnès keeps getting carted around Rio by her captors, and Adrien keeps missing her by seconds.

At one point Catalán takes her into his seaplane, and though he doesn’t have any idea how to fly, Adrien steals a yellow monoplane from an amateur pilot who’s just happened to have parked it with its motor running, and gives chase as best he can. When he finally bails out of the plane (which left me feeling sorry for the poor pilot he stole the plane from, who’s going to recover only a useless pile of wreckage), he gets caught in a tree in the middle of an alligator-infested swamp. Fortunately, a hunter comes along in a boat and blasts the alligators (the two closest to Adrien, anyway) with his shotgun, rescuing Our Hero and taking him to a bar called Lola’s which apparently has a whorehouse attached, since the hunter says they can get girls there. Only Lola (Simone Renant), who sings an appropriately raunchy cabaret song as part of the establishment’s entertainment (though she’s singing in Portuguese and we don’t get subtitles) is herself part of Catalán’s sinister plot. Adrien flees and gives chase when he sees Catalán take Agnès in a car; he runs after it and finally tracks them down to an airport that still seems to be under construction. Though the titular locale is Rio de Janeiro, the buildings we see look like the futuristic architecture of Brazil’s purpose-built new capital, Brasilía (which opened for business in 1962, two years before this film was made). Adrien pursues Catalán and his rent-a-thugs through the construction site in a series of gags that made me wish Buster Keaton had made a similarly plotted film in the late 1920’s; he certainly could have, and from the looks of things de Broca had clearly studied Keaton’s work as well as that of similarly physical screen comedians like Charlie Chaplin and Jacques Tatí.

Ultimately there’s a neat worm-turning ending in which Catalán assembles the statues in the location he’s been guided to by slips of something-or-other in concealed compartments in them (one wonders what they were written on: I don’t think ancient indigenous Brazilians would have access to modern-day paper, which would probably not have survived the thousands of years anyway), and each of the statues contains stones that if assembled in the right order, a light shining through them from the proper direction will reveal the hiding place of the Maltec treasure. Only as soon as the cave lights up from the light from the stones and Catalán starts digging up the fortune in diamonds the MacGuffin statues have led him to, the whole jungle starts collapsing around him. At first it looks like the Maltecs protected their treasure by booby-trapping it, especially since we’ve seen some ominous-looking human skeletons around it. But eventually Adrien and Agnès escape and we find it’s … a Brazilian road crew, bulldozing this section of jungle for a new freeway. That Man in Rio is a clever enough film, with genuinely entertaining chase scenes, but it’s not the sort of plot Belmondo played best and the almost Jerry Lewis-like doofusness of his character gets tiresome after a while. (Remember that this film was made at a time when there was a huge cult around Lewis among French critics, who were routinely proclaiming him the screen’s greatest comedian since Chaplin and Keaton.) I’m glad I finally saw this film again under auspices where at least I could understand it instead of having to piece it together from two languages I didn’t (and still don’t) speak, but it’s really not very good.