CHINESE ADVENTURES IN CHINA.

France, 1965, 104 minutes, Colour.
Jean-Paul? Belmondo, Ursula Andress, Jean Rochefort.
Directed by Philippe de Broca.

Philippe de Broca directed Jean-Paul? Belmondo in a number of films including some rollicking adventures like That Man in Rio. This film was inspired by that film as well as by aspects of Jules Verne’s stories like Around the World in Eighty Days.

Jean-Paul? Belmondo portrays a playboy adventurer who travels to various parts of the world – with a mixture of action, suspense – and slapstick. He has several leading ladies – the principal one being Ursula Andress who four years earlier had emerged so dramatically from the sea in Dr No.

1. Did you enjoy this film? Its humour, adventure, colour, farce? Which aspect was meant to predominate?

2. The film was strong on fantasy. It invited audiences to let go and indulge their fantasy and whims. Now successful was it in this? How enjoyable an occupation is this? How does film give the opportunity for such indulgence in imagination and fantasy? As regards adventure, wealth, loving, reality and unreality, machines, distant lands and adventures etc.?

3. How well did the film use its Jules Verne basis? How did it outdo it in satire and parody? The hero and his mock-heroism? The parody of film styles: the butler, the gangsters, Eastern villains, Himalaya sanctuaries, Dr. No and Bondian adventures, car chases etc.? Comment on the detail of the adventures - the exaggerated humour and their success, such details as the opposite of the striptease?

4. How much did the film depend on Jean Paul Belmondo and his personality and style? Did he create a character in Arthur, or a comic-strip character? How sensible, how stupid? Parodying the conventions of an adventure hero? The opening suicide attempts? The learning to live for life? The daredevil attitude towards the adventures? His relationship to his butler, to Mr. Go, to his prospective in-laws, to Alexandrina?

5. How attractive was Ursula Andress as Alexandrina? How fitting was it to be in this kind of film? What did she add to the film and its fantasy?

6. The importance of the butler? was he too much for this film or essential to its style, especially in the Himalaya adventures, and the ending?

7. Which of the adventures seemed the most interestingly filmed and enjoyable? The sequences in China, in the mountains, on the beaches and the cast of thousands, the car chases, the planes and the jumping from one plane to the other etc.? How important was the editing for the success of these adventure fantasies?

8. Are audiences able to take this kind of farcical entertainment? Can they respond well to such Gallic comedy? And the comic mentality behind such films with its presentation of human foibles and the foibles of film audiences?