It began with Tintin. Hergé’s comic books about a globe-trotting journalist who keeps getting into scrapes was irresistible source material at a time when cinema’s latest attraction was splashy travelogue adventures. But Tintin was a big enough deal that Francophone filmmakers were wary of not doing it justice. Alain Resnais was attached to an adaptation; it’s fascinating to think what the director of Last Year at Marienbad (and a huge comics fan) would’ve done. But it never came to pass, and the project was offered to director Philippe de Broca, who decided against a straight adaptation and set out instead to make a film suffused with the spirit of Tintin.
Everything came together loosely and fortuitously. De Broca’s previous film, the swashbuckler Cartouche (1962), had been a hit for Jean-Paul Belmondo, who’d become one of Europe’s hottest stars after Breathless (1960), the start of the French New Wave. Belmondo and de Broca had enjoyed a visit to Brazil to promote Cartouche… and decided to make a film about a man from Rio. Several writers got involved, but it was in Jean-Paul Rappeneau that de Broca found a kindred comic spirit. They already had Tintin in mind; the producers wanted a touch of Bond (007 had debuted in 1962 with Dr. No).
The most overt borrowing from Hergé occurs at the very start, the spiriting of an Amazonian artefact from a museum mimicking a robbery in The Broken Ear. The thieves also abduct the two people who’d know the whereabouts of two other statues in the set: a famous late explorer’s daughter, Agnès (Françoise Dorléac), and his friend, museum curator Catalan (Jean Servais). They fly them to Rio, where the other statues are hidden, with a promise of treasure for whoever finds all three. They don’t realise they’re being tailed by Adrien (Belmondo), Agnès’ soldier boyfriend.
As the plane bears down on Rio, Georges Delerue’s music changes from strings to an infectious samba rhythm. It’s a sign that the reserve of Europe—and the associated cinematic worries of plot and convention—will soon be sacrificed for something more spontaneous and fun. The film, already quite manic, now starts to really move. It shimmies across rainforests and landfills and modernist villas, sun-kissed and silly, the bickering pair at its centre extricating themselves from one mess only to land in another.
Belmondo will always be associated with Breathless, but it’s films like these that catch him in his element. “I really prefer making adventure movies like Rio to the intellectual movies of Alain Resnais or Alain Robbe-Grillet,” he said in an interview in 1964. A former boxer, he had a dancer’s grace and performed a lot of his own stunts. There’s a breathtaking section in That Man from Rio in which Adrien is being chased through a skeletal Brasilia (then under construction, used by de Broca to surreal effect). He ends up crossing between two high-rises by pulling himself across a steel wire. Rushes from the shoot show it’s the actor himself performing the stunt. This is the sum total of Belmondo, a supremely deft actor who also belongs with Buster Keaton, Jackie Chan and Tom Cruise as someone willing to risk it all for cinema.
Like Chan and Cruise, Belmondo can sell a gag the way silent comedians like Keaton and Harold Lloyd could. This is worth its weight in gold in a film that only pays tribute to the silents but also to cartoons of all kinds. My favourite comic book moment isn’t a Tintin reference but rather when Adrien is punched during a glorious tavern brawl, somehow ends up with a drink in his hand, takes a sip and is immediately supercharged. As he swings and socks his way out of trouble, I realised he reminded me of Popeye.
That Man from Rio would have found its place in film history regardless, but this task was made easier by a fan it picked up along the way. When Steven Spielberg was making Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), he wrote a letter to de Broca saying he was working on something inspired by his film. Raiders certainly has a lot of Rio in it—Dorléac’s charmingly headstrong turn is a blueprint for Karen Allen’s Marion —but Spielberg’s animated feature The Adventures of Tintin (2011), with its fluid and perpetual motion, was even closer in spirit to de Broca’s film. You can see Rio’s influence across decades of adventure films. Just last year, there was Wes Anderson’s The Phoenician Scheme—which paid tribute to Orson Welles’ Mr. Arkadin (1955), one of the inspirations for Rio’s script—and the last Mission: Impossible film, in which Tom Cruise ends up dangling off a yellow biplane, just like Belmondo does in de Broca’s film.
An often underrated trump card is Dorléac. She’s perfectly paired with Belmondo, her cool impulsiveness disarming his genial tough-guy act. There’s a scene at a party where he’s performing for a group of women, which she deflates, then when they’re alone reminds him with a smile: “Look after me.” They look after each other, emerging from a climactic struggle in the jungle to find diggers and earth movers chewing up the land for a mega-corporation. This connects to a throwaway line at the start, when the police are questioning Catalan about the theft at his museum. “An Amazonian people, decimated by the Barbarians,” the curator tells the detective. “Conquistadors, Europe. You, me...” That Man from Rio is one of cinema’s great escapes, but even escapism has its limits.
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