Mon frangin du Sénégal

If you are fan of Raymond Bussières and Annette Poivre, "Mon Frangin du Sénégal" is a must. It is the second and last movie directed by Guy Lacourt who directed the year before "le Costaud des Batignolles", also written by Norbert Carbonnaux (and Raymond Bussières).



Bussières is trying to fall in love with Annette Poivre, but she isn't interested with this local photographer, so he invents a twin brother aventurer in Africa, like the hero she admires in the movie playing at the local theatre. And all through the movie, he constantly transforms himself from a brother to another. Constant fun. Plus Noël Roquevert and Louis de Funès (just two scenes). It suited very well to Raymond Bussières to play in these comedies happening in a small picturesque village, like in "la Loterie du Bonheur", with ancient shops (butcher's, grocer's, baker's, ...). Old time village spirit, now forgotten with supermarkets.

A photographer is in love with the grocer's daughter.Alas the girl is an adventures movie fan and spends her time daydreaming of Gary Cooper or Eroll Flynn (you should hear Noel Roquevert pronounce the actors' names).To seduce the girl ,the poor lad invents an imaginary brother from Senegal who comes to visit him.But it's a hard work to play two parts and it's a real juggling art to make both of them live.

Raymond Bussières manages quite well in the kind of performance Fernandel and Michel Simon had already broached .The movie is perfect Saturday-night-at-the -movies-in-the -fifties stuff ,and it's pretty funny,although it loses steam in the final episodes ,notably those of the native and of the lion,probably inspired by Alphonse Daudet's "Tartarin De Tarascon" .Louis De Funès has two scenes:he's cast as a doc ,actually a charlatan à la Doctor Knock.

Roquevert's grocery store where you can buy anything ,where a nice sign on the wall reads "we are unable to give credit to our customers at the risk of making ourselves enemies",is now a thing of the past ,which slowly but inexorably began to disappear in the late sixties ,with the expansion of the supermarkets . The grocer sells absolutely everything:he can even offer products of Senegal;and there's a poster of every movie now showing in the theater:hence the daughter's passion.