Attendez, chauffeur! (1932) - A wonderfully chaotic French comedy short

If you have twenty-five minutes to spare and love dusty, crackly French comedies from the early thirties, Attendez, chauffeur! is actually a pretty fun time capsule. 🚕

Anyone who enjoys fast-talking black-and-white farce will probably get a kick out of this. But if you hate scratchy audio and people yelling over each other in vintage Parisian slang, you will absolutely hate it.

The whole plot is basically a giant game of telephone but with a taxi.

Raymond Cordy plays this incredibly stressed-out driver who is told to wait outside a house, and then everything just goes completely off the rails. He has this amazing giant mustache that seems to twitch whenever he gets annoyed, which is basically every three seconds.

Honestly, the mustache deserves its own acting credit.

The movie feels like a stage play that someone decided to film on a dare. People are constantly running in and out of doors, slamming them so hard the camera actually shakes a little bit.

There is this one scene where Lucienne Parizet is arguing with her husband, and you can hear a dog barking in the distance. I am almost 100% sure that dog was not supposed to be in the movie, but they just kept filming anyway. 🐕

I love little accidents like that.

It makes the whole thing feel so much more alive than the polished stuff we get now.

The pacing is absolutely relentless. It is nothing like the quiet, slow-moving beauty of Moana; this is pure, loud caffeine from start to finish.

Sometimes the dialogue is so fast that the subtitles can barely keep up. I don't even think my French is good enough to catch all the slang they are throwing around.

But you don't really need to understand every word to get the jokes.

Raymond Cordy’s face does most of the heavy lifting here. He has this look of pure, exhausted defeat that anyone who has ever worked in customer service will instantly recognize.

At one point, he just stares directly at the camera for a second too long, and it is so funny.

The audio quality is pretty rough, though. The car engine sounds less like a vehicle and more like a lawnmower that is choking on a shoe.

If you want something silly and short, this is a great little distraction. It is definitely more entertaining than some other comedies of the era, like the clumsy antics in Edgar's Sunday Courtship.

Just don't expect a masterpiece. It is just a goofy short about a guy who really, really wants to get paid for his fare.