Literally translated, Drôle de drame means “funny drama”, which is a tad misleading, because this screwball comedy, despite grafting a murder mystery plot atop the proceedings, is anything but serious. Director Marcel Carné (Children of Paradise) employs many of the conventions of the farce, including: the dotty ever-fainting spinster; the hypocritical churchman who, despite boasting paternity of 12 children, manages to find the time (and energy!) to carry on an illicit relationship; scandal-phobic social-climbing blue bloods; the shy and foolish lover; as well as popular plot machinations like mistaken identity and the hastily re-written last will and testament.
Set in Edwardian England, though it is performed entirely in French, which adds to the wonderful wackiness of it all, the film has a decidedly French outlook on class conflicts. The film is comparable to Jean Renoir’s superb Rules of the Game, which was released the same year and boasts a similar assault on upper crust mores. The game’s afoot when the Archbishop Archibald Soper of Bedford, played by the great theatre star Louis Jouvet, suspects his eccentric cousin Irwin Molyneux (Michel Simon) of poisoning his wife (when in reality he’s been using his poison prose to craft mystery novels on the sly). Soper sets off a wild series of events spurred on by an upper-class disdain of scandal. A noted botanist, Irwin writes the popular entertainments to raise money to maintain he and his wife Margaret in the fashion to which they’ve grown accustomed. So great in Clouzot’s Quai des Orfevres, Jouvet uses the miming skills of a silent film actor to convey his character’s hilarious hypocrisy.
Appearances must be kept, cost be damned. However, after she offends her kitchen staff and they quite en masse, there’s both irony and poetic justice in the scene where Irwin’s snooty wife Margaret (Francois Rosay) is forced to hide in the kitchen and secretly cook the meal for her guest, the Archbishop. In order to explain her absence, Irwin heaps one lie atop the next, until he’s constructed a fabrication so absurd the archbishop soon suspects him of killing his wife, perhaps as part of a larger killing spree. Perhaps, he wonders, his dotty cousin is the serial killer who has been murdering the community’s butchers? Completing the cycle of absurdity, when faced with the embarrassment of admitting the evening was a charade, Irwin and Margaret decide it’s more important to save face, even if it means facing a murder rap, than to come clean.
This comedy of manners pokes incessant fun at the lengths to which people of distinction and class will go in order to hide the fact that they actually have very little of either. The vast rift between reality and illusion, fact and fantasy plays out even in the artificiality of the world created for these characters to move around in. A dash of Sherlock Holmes dolloped atop some Importance of Being Earnest in the film’s more inspired bits, and a little Arsenic and Old Lace in some of its sillier ones.
The only characters who seem to stand any chance of real happiness are Billy the milkman (Jean-Pierre Aumont) and the maid Eva (Nadine Vogel), who have none of the affectation of the others While Billy’s greatest talent appears to be weaving tales to impress Eva, Irwin promptly “borrows” them for his novels. In this world, every attempt at originality is co-opted. Comic riffs on the corrupt values inherent in a class system and the malleability of individual identity provide the backbone of the film’s ideas and its best examples of humour.
Comic riffs on the corrupt values in a class system and the malleability of individual identity provide the backbone of the film’s ideas and its best examples of humour.- Dan Jardine
