Jacques Tati
Here’s a vintage 45 on the French Fontana label. Soundtrack music to the French comedy classic Mon Oncle. I saw this movie with my friend Tony Jacobs in Jr. High School. Maybe at Case Western Reserve (where they had a good film series and we saw a lot of foreign films) or at the Cedar Lee theater where they still show the best foreign and independent films. I don’t remember much about the movie, but that Jacques Tati was like the French Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton. Tony turned me out to lots of great movies and music in those formative years. Here’s a bit from Wikepedia about Jacques Tati:
Jacques Tati (October 8, 1909 ““ November 5, 1982) was a noted French filmmaker Originally a mime, Tati’s films have little audible dialogue, but instead are built around elaborate, tightly-choreographed visual gags and carefully integrated sound effects. In all but his very last film, Tati plays the lead character, who – with the exception of his first and last films – is the gauche and socially inept Monsieur Hulot. With his trademark raincoat, umbrella and pipe, Hulot is among the most memorable comic characters in cinema. There exist several recurrent themes in Tati’s comedic work, most notably in Mon Oncle, Playtime and Trafic . These include Western society’s obsession with material goods, particularly American-style consumerism, the pressure cooker environment of modern society, the superficiality of relationships among France’s various social classes, and the cold and often impractical nature of space-age technology and design.
Mon Oncle (My Uncle), was his first film to be released in color and perhaps his best-known work. The plot centers on M. Hulot’s comedic, quixotic and childlike struggle with postwar France’s mindless obsession with modernity and American-style consumerism. Mon Oncle quickly became an international success, and won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 1958.