May 22, 2020 – The Tall Blond Man with One Black Shoe (1972) Kanopy
The Tall Blond Man with One Black Shoe is the comedic bookend to the last film I watched: Investigation of a Citizen Beyond Suspicion. Both early 1970s films deal with the amoral and brutal surveillance and repression by government security forces over the citizens of their country. And both films have really long titles. But where Investigation of a Citizen is mostly serious, The Tall Blond Man is a slapstick sex farce. I start laughing to myself just thinking about Peirre Richard as the mild-mannered, awkward violinist who is randomly identified to a faction of the security police as a superspy and Jean Carmet as the violinist’s best friend who believes himself to be going crazy as dead bodies appear and disappear at a dizzying pace. The Tall Blond Man also features a great panpipe-heavy score by Vladimir Cosmo (who also scored Diva) and the best backless dress of all time.
The Tall Blond Man is another film that I saw and loved at an Ann Arbor film society in the early 1980s. If the movie sounds familiar, you may have seen the mediocre 1980s English-language remake starring Tom Hanks. But don’t let a pale Hollywood imitation put you off of the real thing. It is so nice to revisit an old favorite from my youth, full of pratfalls and mistaken identities, and still find it as entertaining as I remembered.