General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20267 min read

Le Corniaud

Le Corniaud (English title: The Sucker) is a 1965 French-Italian comedy road movie directed and co-written by Gérard Oury, starring Bourvil as the naive Parisian shopkeeper Antoine Maréchal and Louis de Funès as the gangster Léopold Saroyan, who tricks Maréchal into driving a Cadillac full of contraband from Naples to Bordeaux.¹^•² It was the top film at the French box office of 1965, with 11,739,783 admissions, and a major success for Oury that established him as a comedy director and helped consolidate the stardom de Funès had gained with Le Gendarme de Saint-Tropez.³^•⁴^•⁵^•¹⁷

Key fact	Detail
Director and writers	Gérard Oury (director, scenario), with Marcel Jullian (scenario) and Georges Tabet and André Tabet (dialogue)⁶
Release	France, 24 March 1965; CNC visa no. 29466 dated 12 March 1965, rated for all audiences¹
Length and format	117 minutes, feature film, France/Italy production¹
Lead roles	Bourvil as Antoine Maréchal; Louis de Funès as Léopold Saroyan; Venantino Venantini as Mickey "le bègue"⁶
French admissions	11,739,783 in total, first place in the 1965 French box office³^•⁴
Music	Georges Delerue, with use of Gioachino Rossini⁶
Production	Les Films Corona, producer Robert Dorfmann, distributed by Valoria Films⁶

Spoilers

Plot

Antoine Maréchal, a small Parisian merchant, is about to leave on holiday to Italy when his car, a Citroën 2CV, is crushed by the luxury car of the irritable Léopold Saroyan, presented as the director of a large import-export firm.⁶ As compensation Saroyan offers Maréchal a paid trip and the job of driving a Cadillac from Naples to Bordeaux, supposedly destined for Miami.⁷ Maréchal does not know that the car is loaded with heroin, gold, and a large diamond called the Youkounkoun, hidden in the horn, and that Saroyan is in fact a trafficker using this honest, inconspicuous driver to move the goods across the border.²^•⁵ Along the route, pursued by the Italian mafia, the trip turns into a series of comic episodes built on misunderstandings and gags.²

The title itself carries the joke. In a television interview at the film's release, Oury explained: "Le corniaud est un brave chien. Le corniaud sera André Bourvil au début puis Louis de Funès à l'arrivée" (the corniaud, a simple soul or dupe, is Bourvil at the start and de Funès at the end, since the trafficker is the one who ends up fooled).⁸

Origins and production

Oury came to the project after a career setback as an actor and two unsuccessful dramatic films. During the shooting of Le crime ne paie pas (1962), Louis de Funès told him he was a comedy author who did not yet know it, and Oury took the advice.⁴ The idea for the film came from a real news story: on 21 January 1962 the French television presenter Jacques Angelvin was arrested in New York for attempting to smuggle heroin in his car. Oury called the idea "formidable" and wrote the film for Bourvil and de Funès as the dupe and the rogue.⁴^•²

At the time the two stars were not equals. Bourvil was already a leading French comedy star, while de Funès was shooting the low-budget Le gendarme de Saint-Tropez, released in September 1964 while Le Corniaud was still in production.⁴^•⁵ Despite Oury's lack of experience in comedy, the production granted him a substantial budget, allowing the road movie to be filmed on real locations with elaborate sets.⁴ IMDb records shooting dates from 31 August to 11 October 1964, with locations including the Villa d'Este at Tivoli, the port of Naples, and places in Paris, Carcassonne, Saint-Raphaël, and Bordeaux.⁹^•⁷ The SACEM exhibition account instead dates the shoot from September to the end of December 1964, closing with the 2CV scene.⁴

The accident scene. The film's celebrated opening gag, in which the 2CV falls to pieces, was built rather than improvised. Two days before shooting began on 29 August 1964, the son of the first assistant director wrecked the Jaguar that de Funès was to drive, so a Rolls-Royce was substituted. The special effects chief Pierre Durin cut the 2CV into 250 pieces, joined them with hooks, and fitted small electric devices to release the hooks so the car could disassemble on cue.¹⁰

The Bourvil–de Funès duo

The film is built on the contrast between the two leads: Bourvil's good-natured, seemingly simple merchant against de Funès's nervous, aggressive trafficker, a pairing critics describe as complementary.⁵^•¹¹ The two actors had already appeared together in earlier films, including La Traversée de Paris (1956), and Le Corniaud is counted as their third headlined reunion, one year before La Grande Vadrouille.²^•¹⁰ Memorable sequences include the garage scene in which de Funès performs a near-silent mime number, the shower scene written for Bourvil, and the opening collision with its line "Bah maintenant, elle va marcher beaucoup moins bien, forcément !"¹¹^•¹⁰

Release and box office

The film received its CNC visa on 12 March 1965 and opened in French cinemas on 24 March 1965.¹ It opened with 124,038 admissions in France and reached a cumulative total of 11,739,783, of which 2,743,707 came from Paris and its surroundings.³ One box-office history records that French distribution ran continuously from March 1965 to the end of 1977, by which point the film had reached about 11.7 million spectators.⁶ It finished first at the French box office for 1965, ahead of films such as Doctor Zhivago (9,801,000 admissions in the 1964–1969 period listed by one scholarly source).⁴^•¹² A survey of French popular comedies places it among the genre's biggest domestic successes, at 11.7 million entries.¹³

The commercial result transformed the careers involved. Oury became a reliable box-office draw, and Le Corniaud consolidated the stardom of de Funès, which had begun with Le Gendarme de Saint-Tropez (1964).⁵^•¹⁷ The same team immediately repeated the formula: Oury revived an abandoned scenario about a downed British bomber in occupied Paris, and La Grande Vadrouille (1966), again with Bourvil and de Funès, sold more than 17 million tickets and remained the most-seen French film until 2008.⁴

Reception and legacy

Contemporary French critics responded favorably. Robert Monange in L'Aurore praised the film and called Bourvil "tout à fait exceptionnel"; Henri Chapier in Combat noted that Oury gave priority to the gag over authorial wordplay; Jean de Baroncelli in Le Monde called it a "très heureuse surprise".² In L'Humanité, the Communist critic Lachize welcomed it as "a pleasing attempt to give to French cinema what it lacked most: a true sense of humour, devoid of any vulgarity and easy tricks".¹²

Later assessments are more divided on the film's construction while agreeing on its two stars. Viewer reviews on AlloCiné, where the film holds a spectator rating of 3.7 from 142,884 notes, repeatedly single out the opening accident, the garage mime, and the duo's chemistry, while some find the plot thin and parts dated.¹¹ A retrospective essay credits the film's photography by Henri Decaë with turning the Italian route from Naples to the French border into a showcase of landscapes and architecture, and notes that bad summer weather in Italy pushed the production well over its planned budget.¹⁴ The film remains a fixture of French television reruns and was restored for a 50th-anniversary Blu-ray edition in 2015, which included an 83-minute documentary on the troubled shoot and Oury's annotated original script.¹⁰^•¹⁵ Its cultural reach extends into French comedy generally: Coluche cited Bourvil's gesture of sharing billing on Le Corniaud as the model for his own demand over star billing with Louis de Funès on L'Aile ou la cuisse.¹⁶

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Comedy and romantic films (individual works) › Comedies of the 1960s

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 21, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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