On his dying bed, a middle-aged gangster entrusts both his fortune and his daughter to a childhood friend. This is not an easy task, since many of the dead man's underlings declare a revolt and refuse to pay their dues. Moreover, the said daughter turns out to be a charming but mischievous twenty-something of the pampered princess type, who is surrounded by all kinds of "jeunesse dorée" nitwits. A movie which, to put it mildly, does not live and breathe an all-embracing love for humanity. "Les tontons" is notable mainly for its excellent cast and performances - Ventura is outstanding - and for its sharp-witted dialogues, which are as cool and bracing as a vodka martini. Many of these "bons mots" and aphorisms have entered French culture. And rightly so : what about the psychological accuracy of a gem like "Morons will try anything, in fact that's how you recognize them" ?Serves as a useful reminder of the fact that many a golden-haired beauty owes her finishing school poise to an ancestral fortune rooted in violence, crime and exploitation.

So this film starts out as clearly displaying its intent to be a film noir. The intrigue hits hard, the dialog and scenes are dense with an opaque atmosphere, there's tough guy talk and demeanor all over in each scene...and then, it switches right into all-out comedy. It appears the earlier bulk of the film was merely serving as an introduction then to a sort of ode to friendship and lightheartedness... but then the film towards the end goes back to its initial intrigue which seemed lost in the mix and made unimportant. It's not clear what the film is saying, and worse yet, it's not clear what the film...is. There are good scenes to be enjoyed, sure, but - what is this film really, as a whole ? Difficult to say. It would be difficult to summarize to someone as a plot as the film delves into various totally separate units, like it's some kind of collection of sketches and fun ideas to act out. One of the last scenes with the half-deaf Delafoy father and all the shooting occurring in the house is hilarious, and the wacky sound samples used to mimic the shots in itself are a funny concept. Ventura's brutal uncompromising character is fun to watch, but all in all there's not enough in the plot for the actors to be more than comic book rubber-quality characters and for the viewer to care at all for them, making the plot irrelevant and all the attention drawn to the purely entertaining fiber of the comedy. There's no substance to it, it's all about just having fun, and nothing else. Even a comedy should have something to sensitize the viewer, and some kind of message towards the end.

For a number of years now they have fed us movies about the adventures of mutant superheroes (o.k., I admit I have seen and enjoyed one or two of them). This was preceded by the surreal Schwarzenegger-Stallone-Van Damme-decade (also called the eighties), with action-flick actors whose muscle mass far exceeded their acting skills. Before that, there was Dirty Harry and a wild selection of anti-heroes of all sizes, shapes and colors. But when, exactly, was it, that real men disappeared from the screen? The event that caused the extinction of such dinosaurs as Lino Ventura, Jean Gabin, Lee Marvin, Humphrey Bogart and the like must have been the counter-culture of the sixties. But what a loss it caused. We had movie-stars who were real, gentlemanly (sometimes), cool, human and funny as well as ugly but sexy and we went and replaced them with a bunch of guys in a mask and cape (and I don't mean Zorro).Luckily we all have our VCRs and DVD players and blockbuster and amazon and are able to enjoy movies like Les Tontons Flinguers, one of the funniest, coolest and yet silliest movies of all time. Every actor a character, every dialogue a gem, every scene a revelation about how to make it look easy. Go see this film before you even contemplate to watch Spiderman III!

After the Killer Tomatoes we now have the Killer Uncles (a more or less literal translation of an untranslatable movie). The level of word-play may be guessed at even by non-French speakers when the credits announce it is based on the novel 'To grisbi or not grisbi', which is, in itself, a nod to another novel and classic French movie 'Touchez-pas aux grisbi', with 'grisbi' in both cases being underworld slang for 'loot' in the sense of 'hot' money. Although it has all the trappings of a 'gangster' entry this is actually a comedy of bad manners involving two factions led respectively by Lino Ventura and Bernard Blier. While ex-wrestler Ventura has no problem acting tough Blier, arguably the best actor in the piece by light years and equally at home across the acting spectrum, plays it for laffs so that what we wind up with is a melange. Another French classic. 8/10