Word: broca
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...good life and good pay, most of them end up in a demoralized, debt-ridden limbo of menial jobs and ghetto housing. This contemporary demographic disaster is the subject of Voyage of Silence, a somber documentation of a Portuguese peasant's emigration to France. Produced by Philippe de Broca-a new wave filmmaker best known for frothy fantasy (That Man from Rio, The Five-Day Lover)-the movie is a small masterpiece of compassionate observation and emotional restraint...
Apart from the wardrobe, nothing about this comedy wears well. Though Director Philippe de Broca (That Man from Rio) obviously hoped to make King of Hearts a memorable antiwar statement, his pacific gravity slows the film to a standstill. His lunatics are self consciously carefree, crowning the bewildered soldier their king of hearts, capering about the streets in a parade of spats and parasols. The warring troops are composed entirely of vaudeville krauts and British louts whose follies have been chronicled in a thousand previous service comedies. In a conclusion telegraphed from the beginning, Bates, who has miraculously saved...
...straining to drive home his message, De Broca has failed to observe a fundamental rule of comedy: the absurd only looks that way when it stands next to something rational. The movie makes the whole world look crazy, including the babbling hero. Thus the representatives of war and peace appear equally loony, and one side seems just as good-or as bad-as the other...
...Ears. Pairing Jean-Paul Belmondo and Ursula Andress in a feckless adaptation of Jules Verne's The Tribulations of a Chinese Gentleman, Director Philippe de Broca overbids to repeat the success of his hilarious mock-action thriller, That Man from Rio. The trouble is that Director de Broca's imitation of his own winning formula is not a whit better than anyone else's, and a good deal worse than some...
...trouble is, Male Companion's script might well have been adapted from the same book. Indolence as a theme leads easily to a certain aimlessness of execution, just as nothingness leads to naught. Director De Broca's spontaneity and Cassel's utter abandon with a throng of acquiescent beauties meet every challenge except the vital one of squeezing triumph out of a trifle...