Pierre Billon directed this film about the life and career of the celebrated polyglot Swiss clown "Grock", aka Adrien Wettach. Saw this via YouTube 9/13/15 and kinda enjoyed it. An interesting look at this clown's work under the Big Top, a career with which I was completely unfamiliar before watching this biopic on a blurry, erratic VHS upload.
I usually avoid clown movies and clowns generally, but this film served more as a core sample of the dismal history of Europe in the first half of the 20th century. The subject of the film's life and career was interesting enough to keep me from becoming too focused on the clown thing.
Grock's life experiences spanned the age of horse-drawn transport through the advent of television and jet aircraft, the seventy years (1880-1950) covered in the film. His bits could employ verbal humor and were not confined to what you would expect from a guy in greasepaint and oversize shoes. Some of the performances in the film were not far removed from the routines of Abbott and Costello or even Martin and Lewis.
At seventy he could still move around quite well, play an assortment of musical instruments, and speak a half dozen languages. His character as it came through on the film was very likable and sympathetic, the portrait of a man unfailingly kind to one and all of any age, whether Grock wore the clown outfit or civilian garb. But Monsieur Grock was also more than a little sad, not in the sense of the clichéd "sad" clown, but of a genuinely sad man, someone weighed down by having lived through two world wars and with everyone wondering when and where, not if, the next one would begin.
The real life events in Grock's life take place about a century after the setting for "Children of Paradise" (1945), an earlier movie featuring Jean-Louis Barrault as an artistic ancestor of Grock.
