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Rating: Claude Zidi-5 MADMEN AT THE BULLRUN
Perhaps many remember seeing this Charlots film at least once in rotation years ago on Italian private TVs: since it has not yet been released on DVD, while their anti-consumerist masterpiece 5 Crazy in the Supermarket is available—I said, I settled for a copy on vhs rec. from TV: the total analogue encoding, the color turned to golden yellow, mono audio little room surround, only accentuates its "ghezzian" charm.
The original title is Les Charlots font l'Espagne, from 1973, in Italy Five madmen at the bullrun: the protagonists are a group of fake hippies who, after trying to work, leave for summer holidays in Spain, and here they create havoc. The Charlots had been a beat group, Les Problemes, who accompanied the famous French singer Antoine in the 60s. They had decent commercial success in the 70s, and in this film their destruction of mass bourgeois vacations and rampant consumerism ends up predicting the end of the many myths of those years and ours.
In the comic catharsis, nothing will be saved: adapting as slackers, shoeshiners, street musicians, waiters, lifeguards. As improbable construction workers, they wall in vacationers who are victims of real estate speculation—therefore to eat, they crash a gypsy wedding lunch debasing even Spanish folk music—and there was still Canzonissima folk section!—rearranging a flamenco in disco-music style like the Santa Esmeralda of Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood—and we are in 1973! ; then, after posing as experienced sailors, they dock at a port for VIPs only, and as clumsy servants, they destroy the love dreams of the handsome one of the group, the Italo-French Filipelli, while he tries to seduce with beach guitar and sappy songs a wealthy heiress who hosts them. The Charlots with their gaffes wreck all of Filipelli’s erotic plans, including the striptease of the rich blonde in a kamasutra mood, complete with fake sitar in the soundtrack—the sophisticated instrument of the sixties still lingering—; the same fate for the couple's vinyl record—turned into an improbable unidentified flying object that dissolves under the frightened gazes of the protagonists; notable is the splendid sci-fi record player in an oval shape, today an expensive piece of modern vintage.
Even the Spanish bullfight will not be saved from their destructive and sickly comic strikes. What to say... The music-inspired comedy of the group is surely dated today, given their clear references to heroes like Chaplin, Ridolini, Buster Keaton, Oliver-Hardy, or the Beatles of Help or Hard Days, but at the time the group was a metropolitan myth, hyped by private TVs that made so many kids rediscover escapist films like this one, otherwise forgotten. Rating: for lovers of Today’s Comedies!
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