Instead, he opted for a contemporary thriller spoof incorporating all the prime Tintin elements.....breathless swashbuckling adventures spread out across the world's exotic locales. Blessed with leading man Jean Paul Belmondo, the Gallic Steve McQueen who could effortlessly bounce from New Wave cinema to action-adventure crowd pleasers "That Man From Rio", was an instant International sensation......
And nobody liked it better than fledgling teen filmmaker Steven Spielberg, who lovingly borrowed large chunks of it for his Indiana Jones films. (Irony of ironies.....yes, eventually Spielberg and Peter Jackson devoted laborious years of their lives making an "Adventures Of Tintin" film from the material that inspired de Broca's 'Rio'.....but dooming it by using motion-capture fake humans instead of actors, or as the BQ likes to call it, Creepy-O-Scope....)
No motion capture technology could ever duplicate Jean Paul Belmondo, simultaneously rugged, goofy, charming, tough and in action sequences, both fearless and bendable as a strand of cooked spaghetti. Playing a soldier on a seven day leave, he relentlessly chases after his kidnapped girlfriend (the funny, sexy Francoise Dorleac) who's been spirited away to Brazil. She's key to a villain's scheme to possess all three ancient statuettes of a lost Amazon tribe......when put together, the artifacts will point the way to the tribe's fabulous stash of diamonds. (You can imagine Spielberg filing this stuff away for future reference...._)
That's enough of a plot set-up to send the indestructible Belmondo on a spectacular action-hero's tour of Brazil. He dangles from high rise hotel windows, the top of construction sites and airplanes......he acrobatically dodges speeding cars, fists, poison darts and crocodiles. And the film itself is a travelogue visual feast......de Broca uses the austere, almost futuristic landscape of partially constructed Brasilia as his equivalent to 'North By Northwest's cornfield Prairie Stop, then careens the film into the country's lush rain forests for its big finale.
If you haven't encountered the film yet, you should know it features all the wince-worthy detriments of Tintin, Indiana Jones and the early James Bond films.....the patronizing, backhanded attitude toward the natives of whatever foreign land the white adventurers race around in.......a country's natives are either comic foils, stunt props or evil arch-villians. And the villain's reversal-of-fortune at the end, meant as a huge funny sight gag to properly cap things off, may strike you as a sad harbinger of bad things to come......
We forgave the movie its l964 mindset and simply dug into the popcorn, reveling at the sight of Jean Paul Belmondo swinging on a jungle vine (yes, he goes there), knocking bad guys down as he executes the 58th rescue of his perpetually abducted sweetheart. Forget serious, thoughtful cinema for a few hours.......'That Man From Rio' shows you why people fell in love with movies....for the pure fun of it.....4 stars (****)........but as they say in the veggie-chopper commercials....Wait! There's more!
Stay tuned.......the world wanted a bigger, wilder crazier "That Man From Rio"....and Philippe de Broca and Belmondo went back to work......and they strike back.... in our next post.....
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