Paris in the Month of August and The Killing Game

The French, they run a funny race. Give them somebody else's genre--Hitchcock suspense, slapstick `a la Sennett--and they can dominate the field. But ask them to run on their own course--amour, with plenty of gallic--and, pouf!, they fall apart.

Exhibit A: Paris in the Month of August. A salesman (Charles Aznavour) becomes a summer bachelor when his wife and children take to the shore. Along comes the predictable blonde (Susan Hampshire) to scratch his seven-year itch. Her giddy giggle soon fills the sound track like a klaxon. The two go off on a picture-postcard tour of such out-of-the-way places as the Louvre, the Champs Elysees and the Tuileries, marking this second-rate souvenir "For export only." Aznavour's tragicomic twinkle shines through in such films as Shoot the Piano Player, but here he is required mostly to moon and bleat. Finally, the girl tearfully returns to her pad in London and the wife cheerfully returns to her flat in Paris. To explain his behavior, Aznavour tells a friend: "It's never too late to act twelve years old." That is true only up to age 13.

Exhibit B: The Killing Game. A husband-and-wife team (Jean-Pierre Cassel and Claudine Auger) manufacture Superman-style comic strips for a living, but run out of super ideas. Just a pair of fun-loving kids, they hang around the studio playing with their mental blocks until a wealthy Swiss named Bob (Michel Duchaussoy) invites them to his chalet for a stay. What starts out as kicky soon becomes sicky. Bob is a paranoid who imagines that an organization is out to expunge him. Unfortunately, it is all in his imagination, and to comfort himself he zooms about in a sports car and plays with rifles, speedboats and other supertoys. All sorts of devices are used--pop-art intercuts with Lichtensteinish comic strips, chases through the Alps, love scenes that are neither erotic enough to titillate nor witty enough to be put-ons. "When a life is empty," the scenario sighs, "it is hard to fill it." It is even harder when a picture is empty.

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