Director – Jean Girault, Screenplay – Jacques Vilfrid, Adaptation – Gerard Beytout, Louis de Funes, Jean Girault & Jacques Vilfrid, Producer – Gerard Beytout, Photography – Marcel Grignon & Didier Tarot, Music – Raymond Lefevre, Special Effects – Jacques Martin, Production Design – Sydney Bettex. Production Company – La Societe Nouvelle de Cinematographie.
Cast
Louis de Funes (Sergeant Ludovic Cruchot), Michel Galabru (Chief Jerome Gerber), Maurice Risch (Beaupied), Maria Mauban (Josefa Cruchot), Jean-Pierre Rambal (Taupin), Guy Grosso (Tricard), Michel Modo (Berlicot), France Rumilly (Sister Clotilde), Jacques Francois (Police Colonel), Jean-Roger Caussimon (The Bishop)
Plot
In Saint-Tropez, the gendarmes Cruchot and Beaupied are on patrol when their vehicle abruptly stops working on a country roadside. Beaupied wanders away and sees a UFO, but his claim is disbelieved by the rest of the officers. Cruchot’s vehicle then stops on the same stretch of roadside and he sees the UFO. Back home, Cruchot discovers that the aliens from the UFO are disguising themselves as regular people so they can observe and report on humanity. The only way to tell the difference is that the aliens make a hollow clang when struck and need to regularly drink motor oil. Chaos ensues when the aliens begin taking on the likeness of the people around the police station and at the beach. In his efforts to expose this, Cruchot is thought to be a madman.
The Gendarme and the Extra-Terrestrials was the fifth in a popular series of French comedies set around the exploits of a gendarme and his colleagues in Saint-Tropez. The series began with The Troops of St. Tropez (1964) and continued through Gendarme in New York (1965), The Gendarme Gets Married (1968), The Gendarme Takes Off (1970) and subsequent to this, the final film in the series The Gendarme and the Gendarmettes (1982). All of these are slapstick comedies directed by Jean Girault. The series made a star out of Louis de Funes as the title gendarme.
The Gendarme and the Extra-Terrestrials was the only occasion the Gendarme series ventured into fantastic material. It is worth placing the film in historic context –it came out in 1979 just at a point when science-fiction had gone astronomical at the international box-office with the huge successes of Star Wars (1977) and Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). Almost certainly, it was Girault, de Funes and co jumping on board the bandwagon and adopting SF themes to their own comedy ends. To this extent, the film almost resembles a comedy version of It Came from Outer Space (1953).
The Gendarme films are slapstick comedy. Either you have a taste for that sort of comedy or you don’t. Using The Gendarme and the Extra-Terrestrials as a representative example, the level of the series seems down around the same one as the various Three Stooges and Abbott and Costello films, although perhaps the closest comparison might be to the Pink Panther films with Peter Sellers.
The gendarme Cruchot (Louis de Funes) in front of the UFO
Much of the film centres around slapstick set-pieces – with Louis de Funes frantically running around giving people glasses of motor oil and jabbing them in the ass with a screwdriver but with comic effect always getting the doppelganger and the original mixed up and predictably ending up jabbing his captain and the colonel of the gendarmerie.
The slapstick silliness continues with an extended sequence that has Louis de Funes hiding at a convent disguised as a nun and assorted shenanigans with clothing on a clothesline and he in choir practice in front of the bishop. There are other sequences with madcap silliness in a restaurant, the aliens hiding at the beach and a climax where doubles and originals fight, everyone is taken up in the UFO and it then crashes down in the harbour.
There is the occasionally amusing sequence – an almost meta-fictional series of scenes where the townspeople complain about there being too many commercials at the same time as the dialogue the characters are spouting starts being overrun by product placement.
