Louis de Funès is a monument of French comedy, but did you know that the actor had directed one of his own films?
Legend of French laughter, Louis de Funès has played in countless cult comedies of the seventh art, from La Grande vadrouille to Corniaud via The Adventures of Rabbi Jacob and Oscar. But what we perhaps know less is that he also directed a film! This film is one of the very last of his illustrious career: The Miser, released in theaters in 1980.
In The Miser, a film adaptation of Molière’s classic, Louis de Funès, who had complicated relationships with the young actors of Le Gendarme de Saint-Tropez, plays the character of Harpagon, a miserly bourgeois.
His daughter Elise is in love with Valère, who finds no other solution to get closer to his beloved than to be hired by her father as a steward. As for his son Cléante, he loves Marianne, a young woman without any fortune whom Harpagon also wants to marry.
Louis De Funès always dreamed of playing The Miser, but he declined on numerous occasions, not considering himself sufficiently ready. It was at the end of the 70s that he finally decided to embark on the adventure. And he does it with total involvement.
Louis de Funès thus supervises the entire creation of the film adapted from Molière’s play and shares the production with his faithful accomplice Jean Girault (who notably signed all the films in the Gendarme saga as well as La Soupe aux cabbage). Concretely, the latter takes care of the technical aspects of the staging, while de Funès manages the artistic side, notably the direction of the actors.
Rabbi Jacob: touched by criticism, Louis de Funès refused to do this scene
“Harpagon is not a very amusing character, he is even sinister”declared Louis de Funès, remarks reported in the work Don’t talk too much about me, kids! “But what interests me is what a neurosis like avarice can cause. I would like to show that this man goes crazy like we all do in these moments of panic. Our brain is very fragile when things escape us. We are capable of jumping with both feet or rolling on the ground. And that’s funny!”
The Miser, whose text is, according to the wishes of Louis de Funès himself, almost identical to that of the play, was filmed in the Billancourt studios, in Senlis, but also, for the final sequence, in Tunisia , in the famous Sahara desert. The film, even if it did not reach the figures of the actor’s greatest successes, was still a great success at the French box office with more than 2.4 million admissions in theaters.
The Top 5 of Louis de Funès’ cable outbursts: