La Route enchantée

In his movie debut, star singer Trenet plays Le Fou Chantant (The Singing Loon) and proves to be a high-energy performer of breezy tunes (his standard 'Boum!' is featured) but no kind of actor. And no kind of scriptwriter either, offering what seems merely a digest of some movies he happened to have liked recently. Easily identifiable are Capra and the Marx Brothers, Trenet himself being a ringer for Harpo. Still, the Bluebell Girls of 1938 were an impressively Amazonian bunch, Pierre Caron - not a name in many reference books - achieves a surprisingly lively mise-en-scène and those intrigued by the convergences of cinema and popular music should find this worth a look.