Word: fernandel
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...Sheep Has Five Legs (Raoul Ploquin; United Motion Picture Organization) is French Comedian Fernandel's 150th film and a rollicking demonstration of his virtuosity. The Frenchman with the face that has launched a thousand faces has long been a favorite in Europe, but outside the eclectic alcoves of big-city art theaters and the covers of Philippe Halsman's remarkable photographic interview, The Frenchman, he is hardly known in the U.S. Already booked for showing in 33 cities across the U.S., French-made Sheep should at last give many U.S. moviegoers their long-overdue chance to meet Fernandel...
...broader, slapstick way, Fernandel in Sheep takes on the tricky business of multiple roles, after the fashion of Alec (Kind Hearts and Coronets) Guinness. Separately, and in some technically flawless group scenes, he plays Papa Saint-Forget, a crippled, bitter old vintner, and five quintuplet sons, Alain, Bernard, Charles, Désiré, and Etienne. The episodic action begins in Trezignan, a French village where some 39 years before the film begins, Papa Saint-Forget, wanting a daughter, has become the unhappy parent of the five boys. In an effort to revive the prosperity that was Trezignan's when...
...worse, the five, in the old man's view, had all turned out unsatisfactorily. "At their mother's funeral," he fumes, "they appeared, wearing gloves!" Nevertheless, the committee decides to go ahead with the fete, dispatches the boys' godfather to round them up. As portrayed by Fernandel, they are an odd lot indeed...
...Alain is the famous proprietor of Paris' most chichi beauty salon, a bewildering institution where the elegant clientele has its hair dried in battalion formation, and even the elevator boy speaks English. As Alain, in a ruffled shirt, Fernandel minces convincingly through a parade of slapstick situations, slathering cold cream on a dowager's jowls, roguishly examining a shapely leg, fawning over the telephone...
...received an official purity seal in 1949. **Others now shooting: The Littlest Show on Earth, an Italian 3-D spoof of Cecil B. De-Mille's 1951 circus epic, The Greatest Show on Earth: Public Enemy No. i, a lampoon of Hollywood gangster films, with French Comic Fernandel...