Maurice Chevalier and the Double-Life Shuffle in L'homme des Folies Bergère

Is this thing worth your time?

If you have a soft spot for pre-code musicals and guys who can pull off a straw hat, you’ll probably find L'homme des Folies Bergère pretty breezy. It’s light, it’s fluffy, and it’s about as deep as a puddle. If you need your movies to have stakes that feel like more than a minor annoyance at a cocktail party, stay far away.

Maurice Chevalier is, well, he’s Maurice. He’s doing that thing with his eyebrows and that voice that sounds like he’s permanently mid-wink. When he’s playing the performer, it’s fun. When he’s playing the banker, he just sort of puts on a stiff suit and stops smiling quite as much. It’s not exactly acting, but it works.

The premise is classic stuff. You’ve got the guy who looks like the other guy, and the switch happens because the real banker is scared of his own shadow—or, you know, his wife’s reaction to his business dealings. The pacing is a bit weird though. There’s a stretch in the middle where it feels like they just forgot to edit the scene down, and we’re just watching people walk through hallways waiting for the next song to kick in.

There is a weirdly specific moment where the banker’s wife is looking at Chevalier, and the camera lingers on her face for way too long. It’s like the director couldn't decide if we were supposed to be suspicious or amused, so he just let the film roll until it felt genuinely uncomfortable. It’s these little hiccups that make the movie feel like it was slapped together on a Tuesday afternoon.

Bits and bobs:

• The sets are remarkably shiny. Almost distractingly so.
• The musical numbers feel like they were pulled from a different, slightly better movie and just dropped in here.
• I kept waiting for a punchline that never really hit.
• Chevalier’s French accent is, as always, the main character.

It reminds me a bit of the frantic energy in Safety Last!, though obviously without the actual physical danger. Both films are obsessed with the idea of keeping up appearances, but here, the stakes are just… money and infidelity, which is much less fun to watch than someone hanging off a clock face.

At the end of the day, it’s a perfectly fine way to kill eighty minutes if you’re folding laundry. Don’t go looking for the meaning of life in here, because you’ll just find a lot of tuxedos and some very stiff dance choreography. 🎩✨