A hapless orchestra player becomes an unwitting pawn of rival factions within the French secret service after he is chosen as a decoy by being identified as a super secret agent.

The film was remade in English as "The Man with One Red Shoe", which makes me want to see that version -- I never really had an interest before. This version is quite good, and I especially love the score. It is whimsical and light, keeping the material fun.

The topic of secret agencies against themselves sort of suggests a Kafka-type plot, but it never reaches that level. Because of the humor involved, it might be closer to compare this to a Peter Sellers film. Certainly more deserving of attention than it generally receives.

In what appears to be an homage to 1930s screwball comedies, rival factions of France's secret service are trying to discredit each other, so they need a pawn, but the orders are to choose any random person. So, they find a musician (Pierre Richard) wearing different color shoes and proceed to turn his life upside down. Some of the funniest scenes are their recordings of his personal life, and what the peripheral characters must be thinking when they hear the recordings!

I've seen a few French films from the late '60s and early '70s, although I can't claim to be a connoisseur. But from what I can tell, "Le grand blond avec une chaussure noire" - called "The Tall Blond Man with One Black Shoe" in English - constitutes a formidable representation of the screen's new permissiveness of the era (just check out the woman's dress in that one scene!). The American remake "The Man with One Red Shoe" starring Tom Hanks obviously wasn't quite the same, but still provided a few laughs.

All in all, a laugh riot.

This was a pretty inventive French film that I really wanted to like. I picked up the video because it starred Pierre Richard, who I really liked in La Chèvre. However, unlike this later film, Le Grand blond avec une chaussure noire wasn't really the wacky film I hoped it would be and I found Richard's performance to be a bit too restrained. In other words, the film was billed as a wacky parody of spy films but it just didn't get wacky enough--I expected something more. And, while Richard was occasionally clumsy or a little dim, his performance really wasn't all that funny. As a result, to me it's really just a time-passer.

The actual story idea is pretty creative. Two rivals within the French intelligence agency are at odds with each other. One decides to try and outwit the other by pretending to have a top agent who has incriminating information on his rival--hoping to get his rival to believe that some sap chosen at random is actually this agent. And, the supposed top agent is Richard. While I could go on and describe the plot further, it's probably best you just see the film. One highlight I really DID like was Richard's friend who kept seeing dead people at the end of the film. Yet each time he tried to show Richard, the bodies disappeared...making him seriously doubt his sanity. This was pretty funny, though the rest just seemed to miss the mark somehow.