In the 70's, the musicians turned actors Les Charlots ruled the French box office with their simple, gag-ridden films. Such was their fame that they even made a James Bond parody, the mediocre Bons Baisers de Hong Kong (1975), with Mickey Rooney. Still, in the early 80's, their popularity as actors had decreased, due to their style of comedy being replaced by the more refined one of Veber and Le Splendid, and their constantly diminishing quality of their films. 1983's "Le retour des bidasses en folie", one of their last features, is possibly their worst one.
The film is a sequel of 1971's huge hit "Les bidasses en folie", about five rookies who spread disaster in the army with their pranks to their strict superior. Embracing the hippie ideals of the time, and with the help of Claude Zidi's direction, the film was a huge success, with seven million tickets sold. In Michel Vocoret's far inferior sequel, Les Charlots play three - the other members of the group had quit in the meantime - young, impressionable Frenchmen who are fascinated by their grandfathers' stories about their actions during the Second World War. The whole film is essentially a flashback, in which we follow these brave soldiers, also incarnated by Les Charlots, fighting the Germans through ridiculous pranks.
Despite its promising premise, the film has no elements of real comedy, and drags on for eighty minutes through cheap gags. Les Charlots were never good actors - maybe with the exception of Luis Rego, who had already left the group, but returned for this film in order of preserve consistency with "Les bidasses en folie" - and their films were based on their hilarious gags, a case in point being "Les fous du stade", in which their antics as involuntary Olympic athletes bring heavy laughter. Vocoret's film, on the other hand, is full of gags that have the stupidity of the Germans as their common denominator, something that may have provided some cheap laughs to the generation that had fought in the war, but today make the film a cliché-ridden World War Two parody.
In fact, the film feels like a comedy more suited to a previous era, maybe the 50's or the 60's, when France wanted to forget its mostly shameful war past and preferred to parody its enemies. But in 1983, things had changed, with Jean-Marie Poiré's (respectful) parody of the Resistance "Papy fait de la résistance" being released along with "Le retour des bidasses en folie". The former was a triumph, and is now regarded as a cult film. The other barely surpassed one million admissions and is mostly forgotten. The old France had disappeared, but neither Vocoret nor Les Charlots seemed to understand it. And so, they continued making old-fashioned comedies, until they stopped due to lack of success.
"Le retour des bidasses en folie" is a failed film to all extent. Belonging to an era it shouldn't have, wanting to restore the credibility of an already unsuccessful group of actors, it has nothing to save it from utter cinematic failure. Never again would a Charlots film reach one million admissions. The group's bad choices regarding films had killed their own success.
