Three years ago - 2009 - the Academic-Pseud axis decided to nominate it as the fiftieth anniversary of the nouvelle vague, based on the year that Godard's Brainless was released. So it gives me extra pleasure to remind these jerks that THIS film, starring a man who had been making films for 29 years in 1959 was far and away the top-grossing film that year whilst Brainless couldn't even beat Hercules Unchained into tenth place, which proves that French cinema-goers chose to see what THEY wanted to see and not what Truffaut THOUGHT they should see. I'd never seen it myself and now that I have I find it holds up very well and has the virtue of being a true story. The basic premise is a combination of the old Army Game - walk about all day with a clipboard in your hand and no one will question what you're really doing - and Hide In Plain Sight. Not to put too fine a point on it Charles Bailly (Fernandel), bored with being a P.O.W. in the more or less open prison of a farm in Germany, decides to walk back home accompanied by a cow, making no attempt to evade German patrols and relying on everyone assuming he has some real purpose other than the real one. Fernandel was, of course, a rubber-faced clown and made his name (and fortune) in that capacity but he had shown he was capable of more dramatic acting in one or two isolated films and he does so again here. Excellent.
Review of The Cow and I
