Le voyage à Biarritz (1963) User Reviews

Arletty's very last part...

[dbdumonteil · 6/10 · 17 May 2007]

...before she went almost blind and gave up acting.And she had not played opposite to Fernandel since "Fric Frac" (1939).

"Le Voyage à Biarritz " is not a great swansong for an actress who was featured in the all-time masterpiece of the FRench cinema "Les Enfants du Paradis"! But it is pleasant entertaining harmless stuff.Fernandel,as endearing as ever ,plays a station master (in a station where trains do not stop anymore ).He is proud of his son who's just passed his engineer degree (in London at that)and he tells it to all the world.But the young man does things with a posh English family (beware of marmelade!English put sleeping pills in it to take you to the church where you get married before you have time to catch your breath!)

Fernandel's dream has always been ,when his son has got his diploma,to make a trip to Biarritz and to stay in a chic hotel where his friend,the restaurant owner(Arletty) spent some time when she was young.THere is just a problem:now that the boy is educated ,he is ashamed of his parents and does not know where he stands anymore.

Almost a surrealistic title,"Le Voyage A Biarritz" will appeal to Fernandel's numerous fans.

Sentimental Journey

[writers_reign · 10/10 · 25 February 2017]

Irrespective of critical reaction - good, bad, indifferent - there is really only one rating for this movie and that, as they say in France is dix sur dix, ten out of ten simply because this was the last full length feature film made by Arletty and that's important to those of us who care about these things. If your response is so what permit me to paraphrase Jerome Kern who, when asked to place Irving Berlin in the pantheon of American music replied 'Irving Berlin has no place in American music, he IS American music; that's as maybe but there is no doubt at all in my mind, Arletty IS French cinema and there's a nice kind of symmetry at work in the fact that her last role is opposite Fernandel because both of them came into film in the very same year, 1930 and although Arletty lived for several more years an accident - by mistake she applied super-strong drops to her eyes - resulted in this GREAT, GREAT, GREAT actress losing her sight and, by definition, her livelihood. Already arrested, imprisoned and kept off the screen for several years because she dared to befriend a German officer during the Occupation, she survived the stigma only to be felled by a cruel fate. As it happens she went out on a half-decent film directed by Gilles Grangier who was somewhere between a journeyman and an auteur having done fine work with the likes of Gabin and Signoret. Don't ask me to unravel the plot because I was too busy basking in the glow of a Goddess.