An early favourite of sound audiences, René Clair's musical comedy À nous la liberté! revolves around two prison cellmates who escape and go their separate ways. The first out ends up leading a "respectable" life as the boss of a company manufacturing gramophones; the other gets out only belatedly, and comes to work shifts on the gramophone factory line, which prove every bit as regimented as life in the prison workshop. Fortunately for him, he's the only man who recognises his employer for the crook that he is, and the two become as thick as thieves all over again, as the police close in.Like Chaplin's subsequent Modern Times - on whose conveyor-belt comedy this was surely an influence - it's a film that tries to get the working man on side by telling him what a bummer work is, and what unscrupulous rogues the powers-that-be can be, although I have to confess it doesn't make much more sense than that to the contemporary viewer. Clair links fart gags and frame-breaking jokes with a lot of energetic running around on the part of the players, and a free-associative editing style that is every bit as distinctive, at least in the film's early stages, as the Soviet montage experiments of the preceding decade.
Fun set design includes giant, hand-pulled ticker tapes, though the comedy in front of them now looks charmingly primitive, not to mention downright eccentric, populated as it is by grizzled/gurning faces who seem to have wondered in from an adjacent silent movie set, and others who take great delight in bursting into song. Quirk piles upon quirk: there's a doe-eyed secretary for a love interest, but the two male leads make such goo-goo eyes at one another - both inside and outside their cell - that one might start to ponder the true nature of their fraternity, and whether getting out will actually be less important to them than coming out.
À nous la liberté! is available on DVD from C'est La Vie.
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