Given their open admiration of Hollywood and sometimes slavish imitation, often improving on the prototypes, it's surprising that the French filmmakers were slow to tackle the newspaper pic; virtually all the Hollywood icons played at one time or another a reporter, editor, photographer and some of the films in question - The Front Page, It Happened One Night, Five-Star Final, The Philadelphia Story, His Girl Friday - became equally iconic. Hardly surprising then that I relish the irony that it took a German company, Continental, to turn out a great French newspaper story in La Ferme aux loups. The joint leads, reporter Francois Perier and photographer Paul Meurisse, are two of the finest and most dependable French actors, both with long and distinguished careers but virtually unknown outside France. Perier even gets the girl, Martine Carol, making an early appearance in a leading role. The plot is serviceable; the news-hounds cover a routine story involving the body of a tramp, a little later their car gets stuck in country mud and they seek shelter in an OLD DARK HOUSE and, guess what, there's the same tramp, stiffer than a Laurence Harvey performance. Turns out it's twins, revenge, the whole nine yards in fact but it's lotsa fun.