Le Magnifique

In some ways an odd film - Belmondo plays a scriptwriter who, as he writes the words, we see that action on the screen. He makes himself the fictional character - a send-up of James Bond - and his glamourous assistant - played by Jacqueline Bisset - is actually his neighbour in real life who he doesn't really know that well.They come across as comic strip characters, but I think that's the point. It's a very funny and entertaining film.

Everything as expected - arrived very quickly. Thank you.

Its great and funny Movie. Thank you for Everything.

As something about media industry - an attempt to make satyre about that - only question is for whom?

Action-comedy Le Magnifique aka How to Destroy the Reputation of the Greatest Secret Agent is perhaps the most fun of Philippe De Broca's collaborations with Jean-Paul Belmondo, a 1973 spoof of secret agent movies and pulp novels that clearly exerted a heavy influence on Jean Dujardin and Michel Hazanavicius' OSS 117 spoofs and probably Austin Powers as well. Bob Saint-Clair is the kind of superspy who always gets the girl and never misses the bad guy and, naturally, only operates in the most exotic locations. He's also the creation and altar-ego of terminally broke Francois Merlin, author of 42 novels including The Maltese Pigeon, all written from his apartment in the wrong part of an almost perpetually rainy Paris where he reimagines his publisher, plumber and even a traffic warden as violently despatched villains with no concern other than meeting his deadline so he can pay some bills. That changes when Jacqueline Bisset's student moves in upstairs and starts reading his novels and, worse still, analysing their appeal, and before long he's straying from his winning lowest common denominator formula and undermining his character at every turn as he overanalyses everything and tries to write something that will impress her. That's pretty much it for plot, but it's all played with such straight-faced silliness, whether it be a shootout with an army of frogmen interrupted by a cleaning woman vacuuming the beach, an ill-advisedly discarded cyanide pill killing an entire swimming pool of tourists or the walls of an Aztec temple lair running with blood. Yet as silly as it is, it's also a surprisingly accurate film about the perils of the writing process thanks to De Broca and Francis Veber's script, though sadly it starts to fall apart in the last reel as the novel gets too misogynistically absurd while an attempt to contrive a crisis back in the real world to give the film a big finish falls flat. But luckily the rest of the film is so much fun and Belmondo is having such a ball with all the self-parody that even in a dubbed version you can forgive it. And how can you not love a film that begins with a man being killed by a shark in a phone booth?The French PAL DVD includes an unsubtitled French and dubbed English soundtrack.