It would be both incorrect and foolish to suggest that Alec Guiness was anything less than a fine actor but in the area where he is arguably best remembered, multiple roles, Fernandel can give him cards and spades as well as illustrating that less is more. In Kind Hearts And Coronets - as fans never cease of reminding us - Guiness 'played' eight roles whilst here, playing only six, Fernandel wipes the floor with him. Perhaps we shouldn't be too harsh on Guiness, he was, after all, only as good as the script and all too often the script of Kind Hearts required him only to drag up, get his laugh and move on to the next cardboard character. Here, eschewing the cheap laughs of disguise, Fernandel offers more than superficial portraits of five quintuplets as well as their father. The father in question is an irascible vintner, miffed that his five sons long ago took it on the Jesse Owens and haven't darkened his door since and apparently haven't the least desire to do so. Given that they'll be forty years old any day now the local mayor senses welcome PR if they should be publicly reunited with the old man and to that end the local doctor is tapped to locate them. We're now in Duvivier territory and in fact Fernandel played one of the characters in Un Carnet du bal, another film comprised of sketches in the wake of a quest to find several - in this case - dance partners and it hardly needs to be said that Duvivier does it better but that is not to sneeze at Verneuil who turned out some decent stuff over the years. Most would agree that the second and third segments are slightly better in which Fernandel plays respectively a window washer with his own quartet of kids becoming slowly hypochondriac as the result of an agreement he struck with undertaker Louis de Funes, and the captain of a freighter gambling the cargo, to say nothing of his girl friend, on the perambulations of a fly. The last character, a cure, is largely a topical 'in' joke in which the cure has gone into virtual hiding because of his resemblance to the actor currently portraying Don Camillo in a series of movies based on the Giovanni Guareschi novels. The other characters are a 'Miss Lonleyhearts' journalist and a beautician, not a million miles away from the gay hairdresser played by Fernandel in Un Carnet du bal. This is arguably - together with L'Auberge rouge - Fernandel's best post-war film although The Cow And I, also directed by Verneuil is also in the running. An excellent comedy from an old Master.
Review of The Sheep Has Five Legs
