Le Tigre se parfume à la dynamite (1965)
Directed by Claude Chabrol

Film Review

After the success of his first venture into the spy-thriller genre - Le Tigre aime la chair fraîche (1964) - French New Wave director Claude Chabrol was invited to make a follow-on film in the same vein. That film was Le Tigre se parfume à la dynamite, a more obvious copy of the British James Bond films which were, at the time, proving to be enormously successful throughout the world.  Of course, Chabrol had nothing like the resources that were available to the Bond films, so rather than attempt a straight lift he opted for something more along the lines of a spy parody, similar to Georges Lautner's Les Barbouzes (1964) and Jean-Charles Dudrumet's Pleins feux sur l'assassin (1961), a genre that was also proving to be popular at the time.

Admirers of Chabrol's work - particularly his later films - will be surprised, if not appalled, by this film.  As was typical of spy thrillers of the 1960s, it has an unconvincing and seemingly indestructible hero (Roger Hanin, cast no doubt because of his popularity in the Gorille films), a rambling plot which stumbles from one improbable situation to another, and a seemingly endless succession of pointless fight scenes.  Although the film is now largely overlooked, and is seldom considered alongside Chabrol's more serious films, its success at the box office did enable Chabrol to win back the confidence of his producers after a series of setbacks at the start of his career.

Film Synopsis

Secret agent Louis Rapière - code name “The Tiger” - is sent to French Guyana to supervise the recovery of a treasure from a sunken ship.  The operation is hi-jacked by a group of armed mercenaries who flee with the treasure after a bloody fight.  Rapière discovers that the treasure is now in the hands of a group of revolutionaries who intend to sell it to an international terrorist organisation, Orchid, using the money to buy arms they need to overturn the country's government.  The authorities are prevented from intervening, through fear that this would provoke a national strike, and so it is left to Rapière to recover the treasure and thwart Orchid's ambitions for global domination...