The French, They Are a Funny Race (1955)

Interesting facts

• Based on: The notebooks of Major Thompson

The French, They Are a Funny Race is a 1955 French comedy film written and directed by Preston Sturges, based on the 1954 novel Les Carnets du Major Thompson by Pierre Daninos, and starring Martine Carol and Jack Buchanan.

Production

The film was based on a popular column by Pierre Daninos in Le Figaro. Daninos would write as fictitious English Major Marmaduke Thompson who would observe the French. Daninos then turned these columns into a book The Notebooks of Major Thompson.

Preston Sturges had come to Paris in hopes of reviving his career, which had hit the skids in Hollywood after his partnership with Howard Hughes dissolved in acrimony. He did some work on Broadway, wrote the screenplay for an adaptation of George Bernard Shaw's The Millionairess which Katharine Hepburn, who had performed in the play in New York, wanted to get produced, and then came to France where, because he was fluent in French, he was able to…

Sturges originally wrote a script called Forty Million Frenchmen, about a French author who invents an English character who assumes a borrowed identity. However, Daninos published his novel with such success that Sturges was requested to write a version closer to that. The movie was shot both in French and English using two crews.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.