Movie Quiz: Impossible to get a 9/9 on these questions!

Just a year after the 1965 theatrical success of Corniaud, the winning trio Bourvil-de Funès-Gérard Oury reunited for one of the most popular French comedies of all time: La Grande vadrouille.

The film opens with an English plane shot down by the Germans over Paris. After that, three pilots will parachute down and land in different places of the capital. They are helped by two French civilians, a conductor and a house painter, who agree to take them to a free zone: thus they become, in spite of themselves, actors of the Resistance.

With a rebroadcast of this classic on France 2 tonight, let’s check if the film sticks in your memory with these nine questions. Be careful, the last two can spoil your perfection!

did you know

A historic success

With its 17,267,000 viewers, La Grande vadrouille, released in December 1966, was number one at the French box office for a long time. It wasn’t until 1998 and Titanic’s 22,295,045 admissions that the record was broken. Gérard Ur’s film remained the biggest public success in the history of French cinema for a long time until the release of Bienvenue Chez les Ch’tis in 2008 (20,489,303 admissions) and Untouchable in 2011 (19,503,038 admissions).

father and daughter

La Grande vadrouille marks the screenwriting debut of Danielle Thompson, daughter of Gérard Uri. He subsequently wrote all of his father’s films until Vanilla Strawberry in 1989. He directed his first film La Bûche in 1999.

Completion of changes

Originally, the question for Gérard Oury was to end the film with a scene in which Bourville and Louis de Funes cross the Pyrenees on skis to reach Spain. But this idea was abandoned because it was too expensive because of the snow. That being said, the scene with the gliders that was retained was still produced at a high cost.