The American Beauty

You could expect the worst of a scandal American beauty in Paris, but the title is enticingly misleading - this film is not about sex at all, but only about motor cars, motor bicycles, failing coffee machines, squalid factory circumstances like in Chaplin's "Modern Times" and other humdrum trivialities like that. On this stage of grey working day ordinariness an American beauty enters, but she is a car. I think it's even a Thunderbird. She is white, and when these simple people get the custody of her you must start to worry about anyone getting into any trouble. They all do indeed, many end up in jail, the car itself gets into all kinds of complicated circumstance without anyone driving it, even being shipped on the Seine on a barge, but by some miracle everyone gets out of It alive, and even the car. There is an accident, but it actually leads to the final settlement and establishment of the car as a popular and successful icon and triumph at the same time at last giving full credit to the horse as a superior being. The actors are all delightfully excellent, and Louis de Funès even plays two parts, kickstarting his career. The wonder of the film is that the hilarity never tires, it starts from the very beginning and is sustained throughout, all the characters returning now and then in surprising coincidences, and there is even an amiable political satire. In brief, it's a glorious comedy which, as one reviewer observed, only gets better with time.