In science and the Germans too.

What does explain « La grande vadrouille » success and cult status ?

Not its qualities, however real : the film is a beautifully crafted comedy, packed with anthology scenes, powered by an outstanding duo, which speeds through France gorgeous scenery on a lively Georges Auric score.

Trigger happy thinkers will again proffer sharp explanations.

Twenty years after the end of WW2, a French film tackles France role in the conflict with a Gallic sense of derision : « La grande vadrouille » is France’s « To be or not to be ».

The comedy film offers the French an alternative to the antagonistic myths of universal « Résistance » to, or « Collaboration » with, the Nazis, which did not match their own memories of war.

The French hurried to the film to reconcile their souvenirs with the non heroic on screen adventures of Bourvil and Louis de Funès.

Like most of their compatriots, Augustin Bouvet and Stanislas Lefort are not transfigured by History, WW2 does not spur them to grandeur or into ignominy ; they remain their French selves, with their petty personal conflicts and occasional shows of generosity.

Though in their fifties, Bourvil’s and de Funès’s characters are no father figures -both are old bachelors- : a welcome relief from the stifling presence of Général De Gaulle, who daily reminds France of all that it did and keeps doing wrong, while he exports the opposite view of a noble, ambitious France.

The film portrays France, despite Nazi occupation, like mostly a land of honey and milk : a bit short on good food may be, but not on wine.

The overwhelming majority of the French audience clings to this fiction with no sense of guilt, because it is created by Gérard Oury, a Jewish Frenchman, who was forced to flee France as a kid during WW2.

« La grande vadrouille » thus becomes a good-humoured catharsis, that even reaches out to the Germans ; rather than odious Nazis, they are not unlike « Astérix »’s Romans : obnoxious but generally harmless and ridiculous occupiers.

This is brainy horses---t. Why did the film appeal to kids in 1966 and still does forty years later ? Why does it keep audiences, which could not care less about WW2, De Gaulle and catharsis, laughing their heart out ?

Chemistry, you say ?... What do you mean exactly ?... Well, you know, just that Bourvil and de Funès are great together on screen... Can you elaborate ?... Well, the pair of them is much more fun than each one alone...

Film critics have long reached their incompetence level : it is time they give way to scientists. Not just research chemists : biologists, anthropologists, linguists... Their multidisciplinary task force shall unveil the secrets of on screen « chemistry ».

They shall pour over « La grande vadrouille » frame by frame, dissect Bourvil’s and de Funès’s speech patterns, accents, talking speed, facial expressions, morphology, explore the minutes of their medical files, their heart rate, brain activity, blood group, childhood diseases. DNA analysis shall also give a hand.

This will be the founding effort toward a « chemistry » grid which will rate pairings on a « cold » to « hot » scale : a tool which would have identified « Ishtar » -Dustin Hoffman/Warren Beatty- as doomed from the start and vetoed it, but anointed « Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid » -Paul Newman/Robert Redford-, « Star Wars » -R2D2/C3P0- or « La grande vadrouille » -Bourvil/de Funès- as sure winners.

At last, we shall understand, on a shot by shot basis, how two actors interact and why their compounded effect on the audience can be so much greater than the sum of their acting talents, like two waves riding each other to tsunami status.

With respect to « La grande vadrouille », DNA analysis shall be broadened to director Gérard Oury and supporting cast to picture the full genetic imprint of the film : spiralling between Normandy -Bourvil, whose alias is the name of a Seine-Maritime small town- and Spain -de Funès, whose full name is de Funès de Galarza -, combining rustic and aristocratic stock with Jewish -Oury-, British, German and many miscellaneous elements.

One day maybe, scientific research will tell us that the myriad groupings of the film genes draw a near comprehensive DNA map of 1966 France and we shall know why so many Frenchmen went and watched the movie, laughing consciously at their brother-in-law and unconsciously at themselves.

At least, a DNA map of a certain 1966 France. The millions of spectators, who flocked to the film like a herd, were probably among the « mooncalves » referred to by De Gaulle in his derogatory comment about the French.

They liked their cinema conservative, and may be their politics too, so that many were probably also among the multitude which, one year and a half later, put their faith once more in the very same De Gaulle and an end to an eventful May of 1968 by demonstrating in the streets.

« La Grande vadrouille » was released six months after Lelouch’s « Un homme et une femme » received its « Palme d’or » in Cannes, one year before Godard’s « Weekend ».

Despite its qualities, the film offers nothing new to filmmaking or the future of French society. Lelouch does not either, but it was too early to tell that he would never venture beyond attractively packaged flavour of the month cinema and fashion victim consumerism.

Godard ? How to describe his project ? Iconoclastic ? Reckless ? Ambiguous ? Self-contradictory ? Though his films concurred with De Gaulle that the French -the Swiss too- were « mooncalves », he rejected the French general for another father figure, made in China and possibly harder wood.

All this happened very long ago, but only twenty years after the Third Reich collapsed. Though the film gently mocks the Germans rather than portrays them as the Nazi freaks some were, only a carefully edited and much shorter version was released in the Federal Republic of Germany: 101 minutes instead of 132 ; who knows ? maybe the Germans even won in the end.

For the film fortieth anniversary, a Berlin premiere of its original version seems like a must : German humour has made giant leaps forward since 1966.