That Man from Rio (1964)

Cinematic Sugar Rush - That Man from Rio review by griggs

Jean-Paul Belmondo spends most of That Man from Rio being flung, dangled and chased across Rio like the city owes him money. I loved every minute of it.

The plot is mostly decorative scaffolding: soldier on leave, kidnapped girlfriend, ancient artefact, assorted villains with a suspicious interest in South America. What matters is the incident rate. Something is always collapsing, exploding or arriving at speed. The film has the narrative discipline of a pinball machine, and watching it means spotting the bits Spielberg later smuggled into Indiana Jones. The clearest giveaway is Sir Winston, a shoeshine kid who keeps saving Adrien’s neck: Short Round, two decades early.

Belmondo does his own stunts, and they have an awkward, gangly charm. Some are stitched together with visible cuts, after which the framing shifts just enough to reveal the joins. They’re scrappy rather than polished, which somehow suits the film’s cheerful chaos. Françoise Dorléac gets less to do than she deserves, spending much of the film drugged, dazed and dragged along by the arm, though she brings plenty of sparkle to the chaos.

The story is thin, functional and built mainly to keep the chases standing. That hardly matters. This is pure cinematic sugar rush: breathless, sun-drenched and cheerfully ridiculous, with enough momentum to carry it all the way to the end credits.