First movie introducing Monsieur Leguignon ,which was successful enough to spawn a second movie ( "Leguignon guérisseur")which can be seen without having watched this one.
Monsieur Leguignon is an outspoken crude man from the people whose slang distinguished people as the magistrates cannot understand ,and has a tendency to take things literally for his vocabulary is limited.
The first part is good fun : Leguignon is tried for insulting gendarmes and the impossibility for the simple man to understand the legal jargon leads to a dialogue of the deaf ; to crown it all ,the lawyer arrives after the verdict but is anxious to defend his client all the same;his interminable intervention only succeeds in making the matters worse .
It's a comedy ,but this farce has a darker side to it ,which is rare for French comic films : in the second part ,the unfortunate hero really becomes the victim he claims to be: in the fifties ,many people were still living in slums on the edge of Paris : Leguignon's trial happens because he has had a compulsory order made on his modest property ;and his new lodging is seedy ,like all the slums around .The film also shows the stranglehold the banks have on poor people :by naming uneducated Leguignon president of a society -the purpose of which is to build a decent building for the vicinity-,a crook embezzles the small savings of modest citizens and even the capital invested by the future owners of new apartments of the building.
If this capital was found as if by magic thanks to the discovery of a treasure (!) , the second part is almost pessimistic : Leguignon uses his last francs to buy a lottery ticket , but it's not what the viewer expects; in fact , the ending imitates ,relatively speaking ,Capra's masterpiece "it's a wonderful life" (1945) ,not a bad choice after all .
There is , in this harmless comedy, a plea for a square deal for the underprivileged .
Louis De Funès appears ,but his role is not much more than an extra.
