The best Mel Ferrer’s comedy movies

In 18th-century France, a young man masquerades as an actor to avenge his friend's murder.

Hollywood producer Alexander Meyerheimer has hired drunken writer Richard Benson to write his latest movie. Benson has been holed up in a Paris apartment supposedly working on the script for months, but instead has spent the time living it up. Benson now has just two days to the deadline and thus hires a temporary secretary, Gabrielle Simpson, to help him complete it in time.

A womanizing reporter for a sleazy tabloid magazine impersonates his hen-pecked neighbor in order to get an expose on renowned psychologist Helen Gurley Brown.

The film consists of seven roughly 15 minute episodes, each showing what will happen if one or more of the Ten Commandments will be broken: Jérome Chambard is warned that he will lose his job if he continues to swear; Françoise Beaufort enamored of a stripper calls on her only to find her married to a janitor who doesn't know what kind of dancing his wife performs; Denis, a Jesuit novice, leaves the order to avenge his sister's suicide, which was provoked by Garigny, who seduced her into prostitution and drug addiction; Philip buys a necklace for Micheline though he is bored with her; a young man find out that his real mother is not Madeleine, but actress Clarisse Ardant; Didier Marin, cashier of a bank, was fired by his boss; the Devil appears as a serpent for Jérome Chambard and the bishop are eating.

Set amid the military maneuvers and Quatorze Juillet carnivals of turn-of-the-century France, Jean Renoir’s delirious romantic comedy Elena and her Men stars a radiant Ingrid Bergman as a beautiful, but impoverished, Polish princess who drives men of all stations to fits of desperate love. When Elena elicits the fascination of a famous general, she finds herself at the center of romantic machinations and political scheming, with the hearts of several men—as well as the future of France—in her hands.