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EUROCOMEDIES
"Who's got a computer for a mind?"

As the rich tapestry of tired old jokes associated with the Eurovision Song Contest attests, entertainments co-produced by a variety of countries devided by language are regarded with suspicion at best, and outright ridicule at worst. There's a good case for the prosecution - what chance intelligence or subtelty coming across in half a dozen languages simultaneously? Won't there be endless arguments about who does what? Politics intruding into the production? And how about those Germans, eh? Eh? With films, as with telly, there's not exactly a proud tradition of quality product you can confidently point to in its defence, but at least there are a few morsels that merit more than a quizzical glance in amongst the cobblers, and none more so than in the comedy field. Comedies made across national boundaries tend to go for the broad, the crude, the obvious - national senses of humour, rightly or wrongly, being regarded as non-negotiable commodities. Hence two of the earliest of the genre we're looking at here - the big, star-spangled, multi-location comedy epic - don't exactly major in Wildean epigrams. Nevertheless, Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines, and, to a (much) lesser extent, Monte Carlo or Bust, prove that you can bung such untranslatable national treasures as Terry-Thomas next to Bourvil and end up with something that at least pleases all of the people some of the time.

David Niven, the National Treasure's National Treasure, was no stranger to the big, sprawling co-production, having starred in that Sunday afternoon widescreen staple, Around the World in 80 Days, so he was a natural to star in the quintessential comedic co-production, Casino Royale, the sprawling, chaotic nature of which is well documented by us. A couple of years later, however, came the more intriguing The Brain (Le Cerveau), the Franco-Italian brainchild of Dino de Laurentiiiiiiiiiis, where Niven plays the criminal mastermind of a money train robbery carried out by Jean-Paul Belmondo and Bourvil (but no Cantinflas, sadly for fans of singlularly-named French actors). It's an enjoyably convoluted caper, even if, like Royale, it inevitably descends into incomprehensibility (it was filmed simultaneously in English and French, and probably makes about as much sense in either). The humour is mostly sub-Tati slapstick - Niven's brain is so heavy his head periodically tilts to one side with the weight, accompanied by a comedy noise; Belmondo does some Pink Pantheresque business with an inflatable chair, and best of all Niven's exposition of the robbery is done via a dodgy animation of himself, in military gear, which gets into cross-talk with the real Brain in time-honoured style. As with Royale, there's a great piece of squelchy pop-psychedelia for the theme, by The American Breed.

The other Brit "star" of Royale, Peter Sellers, also got tied up in Eurocomic sheninigans with the Americo-Brito-Italian effort After the Fox (Caccia alla Volpe) a zany comedy by Neil Simon, wherein Sellers, again as a criminal plotting an elaborate robbery, gets to try out endless disguises, mainly as a new-wave film director (the film itself was directed by Vittorio 'Bicycle Thieves' Di Sica) pretending to shoot his masterpiece, which provides cover for his gold-smuggling operation. Victor Mature steps in for a bit of hair-dyed self-parody as an ageing Hollywood star, and Britt Ekland gets to shout at Sellers. The theme this time is by Bacharach and David, performed by The Hollies, with Sellers joining in for bits of spoken word in-character drollery ("Me is a thief!") Uniquely, it even manages to turn its lack of a cohesive plot into a virtue, by dint of a bizarre, throwaway ending gag - "My God! The wrong man has escaped!"

As the seventies dawns, the baton swings back to Niven, and the decidedly dodgy The Statue, in which he plays a Nobel-winning linguist whose neglected wife makes a giant nude sculpture of him with a huge penis, prompting an angry Niven to go searching for the owner of the organ in question. Cue endless feeble gags with Niven trying to catch a quick glimpse in toilets, saunas etc. It's as dire as you're no doubt imagining, and for his sins Denis Norden is credited as co-writer, with a largely Italian cast at least tempered this time with a few Brit names, including Tim Brooke-Taylor, Graham Chapman and John Cleese. Not long after that, Our Timbo dipped his toe again into Eurocom, this time for the BBC, with the feature length Swedo-Norwegio-Finnish-Americo-British endeavour The Case, in which Tim and Cliff Richard, who are on tour in Sweden (yes, together), accidentally nick a case of money 'belonging' to two Scandinavian bank robbers, precipitating a sight gag-stuffed comic chase across Scandinavia, punctuated with songs from Cliff and Olivia Newton-John.

It's not all misfiring mish-mashes in Eurocomedyland, however - the finest example(s) we can think of being, of course, Dick Lester's first two Three Musketeers comedies, which despite the unpromising patronage of Spain and, er, Panama, are top pieces of work. More obscure, but still great, is the Americo-Franco-Italio-German comic murder mystery Who is Killing the Great Chefs of Europe? (Qualcuno sta Uccidendo i più Grandi Cuochi d'Europa) Central to the film is Robert Morley, who turns in the expected baroque stylings as an insufferably arch food critic forced against his will to diet by doctor John le Mesurier. Morley becomes the chief suspect when the continent's top names in cuisine, as named in an article by him, start kicking the bucket. There's a nice tie-up with that other Morley scene-chewing classic, Theatre of Blood, here, as the deaths are all once again "appropriate" - a master baker is locked in his own oven, a man whose signature dish is pressed duck gets, well, pressed like a duck, etc. The suspects mount up - Jean Rochefort is a jealous chef left off Morley's list, Jacqueline Bisset is a dessert specialist, who should be the last to cop it, and George Segal is her chef-hating, hamburger chain-owning husband. A feast of food, sumptuous interiors and pan-continental scenery is, as you'd expect, on hand, as is a top cast with the likes of Frank Windsor, Peter Sallis, Joss Ackland and Nigel Havers keeping the British end up. Most importantly it doesn't rely on slapstick or knob gags to try and satisfy all nationalities. By this time, however, this sort of film just wasn't being made any more, and the Eurocomedy pretty much died on the vine. Still, in the rare occasions when one of these films finds its way onto the small screen, they're well worth a watch - good or bad.

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