La foire aux cancres (Chronique d'une année scolaire)

A few weeks ago, french cinema and television lost Monsieur Pierre Tchernia, one of the most popular screenwriter and director, after having been journalist and among all animator of Monsieur Cinema which helped thousands of youngsters to love cinema by showing the best sequences from classic movies. That's how I discovered the very first scene with Bourvil and Louis de Funès together in Poisson d'Avril.

Monsieur Pierre Tchernia was a very friendly figure in french cinema and television, thanks to his comedies, his most famous being le Viager (as a director) and of course la Belle Américaine (as a screenwriter).

But still there are a lot of unknown movies in his filmography. La Foire Aux Cancres isn't even mentioned in his filmo, it is directed by Louis Daquin, who already directed kids in Nous, Les Gosses. There are 7 sketches dealing with money, alcohol, thieves, ... shot in school, station, grocery, a lot of sets that have today disappeared... Fabulous casting for each sketch : Jean Poiret, Jean Carmet, Jean Rochefort, Jean Bouise, Jean Boyer, Jean Martin, Christian Marin, Julien Carette, Roger Carel, Guy Grosso, Yvonne Clech, Sophie Desmarets, Dominique Paturel, and others already written in the above casting.

Except that the name of Pierre Tchernia as a screen and dialog writer isn't mentioned. So long Monsieur Pierre.

"La foire aux cancres " was first a best-seller, a book who spawned more works of the same genre; as many French people , I read it when I was young: it does not tell a story ,it's a collection of schoolboy howlers ,in every subject:grammar and literature,maths,history ,geography ,science ,et al .

Hence the difficulty to transfer this "dunces fair" to the screen ; the script looks like a collection of more or less disjointed sketches, sometimes terribly dated .

The most interesting is the depiction of French schooling before the 1968 upheaval which changed everything for better or for worse; in those by-gone days ,the teachers were on their platform , dominating their pupils ;they were respected , and their sentences were sacred( hence the mayor's egregious gaffe about Henri the Fourth's minister Sully) .A time you did not have to be educated to make your way of life (now that people are more educated, they sometimes find it hard to get a job),should you believe teacher Dominique Paturel .It was the time when absolutely undecipherable trains passing each other maths problems were given to helpless innocent kids .

A time capsule .