Nov. 26--Opening for a week at the Siskel Film Center in a fine-looking 50th anniversary digital restoration, the 1964 action lark "That Man From Rio" took its cheeky, chaotic cue from the James Bond franchise, as well as Stanley Donen's "Charade" and Alfred Hitchcock's "North by Northwest." It's also a popcorn picture that looked forward. Steven Spielberg credited director Philippe de Broca's globe-trotting treasure hunt for paving the way for "Raiders of the Lost Ark" and the other Indiana Jones movies.
For some reason I'd never seen it, and now I have, and I'm glad; it's fun, in an imperialist, colonialist, patronizing, exotic-marginalized-foreigners way.
The stars transcend the more mechanical bits. Jean-Paul Belmondo plays a French serviceman on a week's furlough. He spends it chasing after his kidnapped girlfriend, played by Francoise Dorleac, the daughter of an archaeologist. Mysterious stolen idols set the whirligig in motion, and 20 minutes into "That Man From Rio" Belmondo and Dorleac are, in fact, in Rio, trying to stay alive and get out of the way of the scenery.
Good thing they're scenic themselves. Belmondo does a lot of his own stunt work in de Broca's film, and when he runs, he runs.
Like the Bond pictures of the era, "That Man From Rio" glories in its lovely, remote locales (remote to Europe and America, at least) if only to rough them up in the process. In one of the strangest set pieces, Belmondo eludes a couple of Brazilian thugs as they scurry and scramble atop a rickety construction site in the newly created Brasilia. The sight is no less bizarre in its atmospheric evocation than, say, Antonioni's "Zabriskie Point."
Like the "Tintin" books that de Broca himself credited as a forerunner, "That Man From Rio" has pure velocity going for it. It's a bit of a bummer to see Dorleac (who died in a car crash three years later, just after completing "The Young Girls of Rochefort") stuck in a haute-couture ninny of a role. But she's a delight all the same, never more engaging than in her dance interlude with the shack-dwelling Rio locals, otherwise known as "the background."
Director de Broca went on to "King of Hearts," which you couldn't get away from in the '70s on the revival-house circuit. "That Man From Rio," at least, takes place in places you wouldn't mind getting away to, especially on the cusp of a Chicago winter.
Dorleac's character puts it best, as she and Belmondo's cheerful lout motor along a scenic highway toward their next round of peril. "We're in the midst of wonders and you play blase!" she says. That's the international language of love, according to an action movie template this film helped to create.
"That Man From Rio" -- 3 stars
No MPAA rating.
Running time: 1:52; in French with English subtitles.
Plays: Friday-Wednesday at the Gene Siskel Film Center.
mjphillips@tribpub.com
Twitter @phillipstribune
