Les Trois font la paire (1957)
Directed by Sacha Guitry, Clément Duhour

Film Review

Although Sacha Guitry is credited with directing Les Trois font la paire he actually had very little to do with it on that front.  Once he had completed the script, he was too ill to direct it - that honour fell to his close friend Clément Duhour, the producer of several of his previous films and an actor with a supporting role in the film.  Duhour would take none of the credit for this film, even though Guitry was hardly ever on set and had next to no directorial input.  It would perhaps have been kinder for Duhour to have taken the director's credit, as he patently had none of Guitry's flair and the film is way beneath Guitry's usual standard.  Duhour's 'generosity' made it easy for Guitry's usual detractors to slate the film - an ignominous end for the director of such masterpieces as Le Roman d'un tricheur (1936), who died two months after the film's release in France.  Duhour went on to direct another film scripted by Guitry, La Vie à deux (1958) and then the dismal comedy Vous n'avez rien à déclarer? (1959).

Les Trois font la paire starts with a typically Guitry-esque premise - namely that everyone lives his life in much the same way that a film director makes a film.  The film begins by introducing the three main players in the story as they wake up in bed and reflect on what the day holds for them.  They are like actors contemplating how to play their roles, and each of them bemoans the fact that he has not been given a bigger part.  Unfortunately, Guitry seems to lose interest in this promising idea and it all gets washed away as the plot takes over, the whole thing ending up as a fairly routine comedy.  Michel Simon, the star of several previous Guitry films (notably La Poison), reputedly loathed the script but agreed to appear in the film out of loyalty to a director he admired more than any other.  Saddled with a lacklustre script and an uninspiring supporting cast (which appears even more feeble when names like Daniel Gélin and François Périer start to get bandied about), the film would be a pretty grim ordeal were it not for the sparkling contributions from the leads, Michel Simon and Sophie Desmarets.  Guitry puts his stamp of approval on the the whole unedifying venture by appearing at the top and tail of it, but throughout the main body of the film he is conspicuous by his absence.

Film Synopsis

Jojo's sole ambition in life is to become a gangster, but to gain admittance to a gang he has to prove himself by committing a daring act. To that end, he kills a stranger in broad daylight, not knowing that his victim is an actor who is playing a scene in a film.  The murder is caught on film, leading Commissaire Bernard to think that the killer will be easy to find.  Sure enough, Bernard soon makes his arrest, a clown from a circus, but then he faces a seemingly intractable problem.  The clown has an identical twin, who is also a clown with the same circus.  Just when the case was so close to be closed each of the twins confesses to being the murderer...