ChicRawIdol
A brilliant film that helped define a genre
StyleSk8r
At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.
Erica Derrick
By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.
Nozz
I saw this one when it was new, in the 1960s, and with age it's only got better. The simple, lovable people of an idealized Parisian neighborhood have an additional layer of nostalgia value as we recall a country that appears to have found its feet again after wartime but has not yet been overwhelmed by globalization. The threat is certainly there, but in comical form. There's a hapless, primitive espresso machine. There's a lo-tech manufacturing machine that's replaced with a hi-tech one-- involving, by the way, a gag I remember from the 1960s version that wasn't in the version I downloaded from the web. And there's the Belle Américaine itself, a huge luxury convertible that is admired by all but something of a mixed blessing. Anyway, the script presents a charming little world and the story is full of well-scripted and well-performed comical episodes any one of which, if you put it into a comedy of the last couple of decades, would be the highlight of the movie.
Cinefill1
-La Belle Américaine English: The American Beauty, is a French comedy film from 1961, directed by Robert Dhéry, written by Alfred Adam, starring Alfred Adam and Louis de Funès. The film was known under the titles: "La bella americana" (Italy), "The American Beauty" (English title), "Der tolle Amerikaner" (West Germany).Plot: -The wife of a rich man learns that her husband has an affair with a younger woman. She takes revenge on him by selling his beloved big car for little money. The worker Marcel Perrignon is very happy about this bargain but when his boss sees the car he envies him and Perrignon gets fired. This is the start of a number of mishaps for Perrignon.
dave94703
Okay, I'm doing this from memory: i haven't seen this movie for 40 years, and it's not findable. But I remember it as seamlessly entertaining, with a simple plot device from which, in true comedic good form, the story flows effortlessly.A factory worker buys a cadillac for, like, $50 from a divorcée compelled in the settlement to sell it and give the proceeds to her hated husband. When he parks the car next to his boss's pathetic compact, the trouble starts.SPOILER ALERT you'll never find this jewel anyway, so I'm telling it.The funniest part of the movie, as I recall, is the running assembly-line joke. The factory is a small, one-room affair, with six or so people laboring around an old, noisy, falling-apart device of unknown function. After much hard labor massaging the machine just so, it's ready for output. But it always freezes, and one worker's job is to kick it in a certain exact place to get it going again. Everyone's moves are totally routinized, hilariously: when the pretty girl rolls up the cart to catch the final product (a one-foot rod of completely unspecific purpose) just as it comes out with a "puoit", the same worker pats her butt at the same identical moment in the process, in the same identical way.In the last scene, the company president invites the shareholders in to see the automated, completely workerless new plant, he flips a switch and the huge, featureless cube taking up 90% of the room begins to quietly hum. Just when it's clearly about to produce the product, it freezes, and the president has to give it a kick to get it to puoit the product out.
rafe82
It doesn't exist on DVD, it hasn't even made it to VHS, and it never appears on broadcast or cable. So you should have no trouble believing me when I say that this movie I saw once 30 years ago is memorable.A slapstick commentary on class relationships, La Belle Américaine is propelled by the plans of a French manufacturer of a metal rod with no clear consumer or industrial function to update the manufacturing process and get rid of their quirky employees. It has a running joke: the pre-automation process utilizes a hilarious Rube Goldbergesque assembly line entailing a final stage where, in a cloud of steam, the machine jams up and dies, only to be revived by a swift kick in just the right place, after which it duly puoits out (that's the sound it makes) one of the mysterious rods. Post-automation, the bustling factory is replaced by a single huge drab and perfectly rectangular machine, which the company president demonstrates for a major stockholder. The new machine hums along peacefully, in contrast to the previous cacophonous process, but at the final stage it sputters and dies, just like the pre-automation machine; the president gives it a solid kick, and it puoits out the rod.
