mfreiser

Louis Jouvet was, I believe, France's greatest comic actor during my lifetime. He was wonderful in Carnival in Flanders (Kermesse Heroique) and in Bizarre, Bizarre (Drole de Drame) but his greatest comic role was as Knock. I had seen this film when I was an adolescent (during the late forties) and later saw another version a decade or so later. I was never certain whether the film had been remade or if it had been recut, but now I see from IMDB that it was, indeed, remade in 1951. I recalled the earlier version as having a somewhat greater number of comic peasants flocking to Knock for their "free consultations" but Jouvet was brilliantly funny in both versions. I wish that I could lay my hands on a DVD or VHS recording of either version so that I could easily convince my friends that the French had something more than a strange fondness for Jerry Lewis, they once had a great comic actor whose work should have been preserved in an accessible form.