Les fourberies de Scapin

A rather talky adaptation of a play by Moliere, this for the most part feels like a creaky and cut-price version of Cyrano de Bergerac: a clever man helping two young lovers be together through his wit and trickery.

This lead character, Scapin, goes back to a popular Italian character from the 1600s, "Scapini", who is largely unfamiliar to an English audience, so I got the feeling I was missing out on references to a past that is not depicted and which I have no knowledge of. On top of that, the humour is very wordy, and a great deal seems lost in translation, so I don't know if it's much funnier in the original, but I found very little to laugh at and the whole affair a little dull.

It's not a badly-made film at all, but hard to recommend and instantly forgettable.