The best Fernandel’s crime movies
If you love cinema, you will share this ranking of the best Fernandel’s movies, although you may have ordered them differently. In any case, we hope you love it and with a little luck discovering a movie that you still don’t know about Fernandel.
The Red Inn
7.2/10
A group of travelers, including a monk, stay in a lonely inn in the mountains. The host confesses the monk his habit of serving poisoned soup to the guests, to rob their possessions and to bury them in the backyard.
The Man in the Buick
5.6/10
The Cupboard Was Bare
6.6/10
The aunt of Alfred Puc, a meek tax-collector in Paris, dies while riding in a moving van. The driver, not wishing to be bothered by a police interrogation, hides her corpse in a cupboard before notifying Alfred. But the van is stolen. Alfred, being the heir of a rich lady, begins a frantic search to locate the missing van and the cupboard because one can't claim an inheritance if there is no 'corpus delecti.' In his search, he gets caught up in an underworld web and finds the body of a murdered gangster in his room. He finally locates the cupboard but promptly loses it again. But, wait, it isn't "finis' time, yet.
Assassin in the Phonebook
6/10
Fernandel plays Albert, the unhappy brunt of jokes by his fellow office-workers who goes from the frying pan into the fire. Albert gets caught up in a robbery that also goes from bad to worse when it leads to several murders. Although he is not a killer and essentially innocent, there does not seem to be very much that Albert can do to convince others of the truth.
Lilac
6.6/10
Also known as Lilac, this early Anatole Litvak-directed talkie was based on a play by Tristan Bernard and Charles Henry Hirsch. The story bears traces of the Bertold Brecht-Weill piece The Threepenny Opera, with heroine Lilac (Marcelle Romeo) consorting with the criminal scum of Paris. Lilac falls in love with a handsome detective (Andre Luguet), but he doesn't let his emotions stand in the way of his duty, and in the end he reluctantly turns her over to the authorities. At $120,000, Coeur de Lilas was one of the most expensive movies to come out of France in 1931, but it more than made back its cost at the box-office.
