Adrien, dashing from 1960s Rio de Janiero to Brasilia, the then new capital of Brazil, in a pink 1929 Chrysler 75 adored with green stars, pulls over at the first modernist police station he spies.
He steps out of the ragtopped jalopy in nothing but boxer shorts, and proceeds to dress and babble in French — cigarillo dangling from his lips the whole time — to the befulled Portuguese-only speaking cop.
“Sir, could you please arrest me?”
“I’m a deserter. I lost my uniform. I flew without a ticket, conned an invalid. I fought with men of all colors and nations, and I drive around in a stolen pink car with little green stars.
“I’m also guilty of public indecency. The handcuffs, please!”
Adrien, played by international film icon Jean-Paul Belmondo, leaves out stealing a French cop’s Triumph motorcycle, sprinting miles on foot to an airport in pursuit of his kidnapped girlfriend, dodging dart gun bolts and fists, and when his own fists fail, kicking any villain he figures has it coming in the crotch.
And that’s before stealing an airplane he’s not quite sure how to fly, swimming miles to an oligarch’s yacht, dodging crocodiles in the Amazon and swinging like Tarzan from jungle tree to tree to free his dizzy beloved (Françoise Dorléac) in “That Man from Rio,” one of the great comic romps of the 1960s.
Filmmakers from the then-new James Bond franchise to Steven Spielberg would borrow from this spectacular action farce, which featured a future Bond villain (Adolfo Celi), locations cribbed for decades of other films and a finale that became a version of of the opening sequence of “Raiders of the Lost Ark” over 25 years later.
“Short Round” from “Indian Jones and the Temple of Doom?” His prototype is a pint-sized Afro-Brazilian shoeshine of many talents and connections named Sir Winston (Ubiracy De Oliveira), who saves Adrien’s French fried bacon more than once in this Oscar-nominated classic.
Director and co-writer Philippe de Broca’s Franco-Italian co-production serves up “The New Brazil” of the early ’60s — striking architecture, breathtaking scenery and poverty mostly glossed-over by the fresh-scrubbed faces of the “simple happy natives.”
The color film stock gives the picture a travelogue sparkle, and the stunts — with Belmondo plainly doing his own hair-raising motorcycle chasing, building dangling, diving, tumbles and crawls through brawls — can be pre-CGI jaw-dropping.
The plot? A couple of sketchy dart-gun wielding characters in trench coats swipe a statue of supposedly little value from a French museum. Professor Catalan (Jean Servais) has just enough time to tell the cops there were three such statuettes, and that they’re “cursed” before he’s kidnapped.
Agnes (Dorléac, of “Cul de Sac” and “Billion Dollar Brain”), the carefree daughter of a dead researcher who was with Catalan when they unearthed the statues, is also nabbed.
But Agnes was kidnapped right in front of her home-on-leave soldier, Private Adrien Dufourquet. He springs into action, a man of no “particular skills,” but a headstrong, impulsive rescuer on the fly.
He has no idea who took her or where they’re taking her. But he wings it westward with her kidnappers, unable to convince the flight crew of the jetliner he conned his aboard that she’s been “taken,” and at every turn, he’s there — trying to free her, hopefully before his leave runs out the following Monday.
“The bad guys always win!” Agnes gripes, once the drugs that made her even dizzier wear off. And so it seems. But Our Man Adrien will see about that.
Cinematographer Edmond Séchan shot one of the greatest short films of all time, “The Red Balloon,” and gives us sumpuous scenery, an “Architectural Digest” visual appreciation of the New Brazil’s architecture, and the occasional stunning shot — Adrien and Sir Winston climbing a mountainside favela in silhouette at sunset to Sir Winston’s cute and cool stilt house.
The editing leans into the travelogue nature of this international production a tad more than is necessary to maintain the picture’s pace, but the movie doesn’t suffer much for it.
And Belmondo, in one of his most entertaining action roles, just hurtles across the screen — dashing and diving and pilfering and conning and driving and dodging punches and crashing through construction sites and swinging from vines and construction dolly cables and falling out of a plane.
Damn.
Most of the time, we can see that’s really him, and marvel at how perilous they made the stunts look around him. Belmondo’s charisma is well-matched to the out-of-his-element and had-about-enough Adrien, a simple and sarcastic man out of his depth long before he’s a fish out of water, or in it.
Director de Broca hit his 1960s peak with this film, and went on to make “King of Hearts” and decades of more lightly-regarded films after that.
The oft-dubbed Italian character actor Celi plays the oligarch behind this New Brazil modern architecture spending spree. He moved into the James Bond universe as Bond’s skin-diving foe Largo in “Thunderball.”
And Dorléac, one of the great screen beauties of her day, had her finest comic role in this film before her life and career were tragically cut short in a car accident that killed her before “Billion Dollar Brain” finished shooting.
Laugh out loud moments and “How’d they do that?” stunts aside, one of the great pleasures in viewing “That Man from Rio” today is to see how this film influenced the action films and action comedies that followed. By the time Roger Moore took over as James Bond, the series’ producers weren’t even hiding their debts to “Rio.”
Spielberg allegedly wrote the director to praise the film and claim he’d seen “That Man from Rio” nine times.
Whatever the influences it spread far and wide, the film today is a grand snapshot of Paris, Rio and Brasilia in the early ’60s, and a reminder that Tom Cruise wasn’t the first to figure out that doing your own stunts, when reasonable and even occasionally unreasonable, stamps an action film with bonafides that show up in the finished film, and in the actor’s confidence or even genuine skittishness while doing them.
The effort shows in ways we don’t just see on the screen. We feel it.
Rating: TV-MA, violence, mostly comical, smoking, drinking
Cast: Jean-Paul Belmondo, Françoise Dorléac, Jean Servais, Ubiracy De Oliveira and Adolfo Celi.
Credits: Directed by Philippe de Broca, scripted by Jean-Paul Rappeneau, Ariane Mnouchkine, Danie Boulanger and Philippe de Broca. A United Artists (Les Artistes Associés) release from Cohen Media Group on Tubi, other streamers
Running time: 1:54
