User:Andrzejbanas/Rio

Plot
As airman Adrien Dufourquet embarks on an 8-day leave in Paris to see his fiancée Agnès, two South American Indians steal an Amazonian statuette from the Musée de l'Homme and force Professor Catalan, the curator, into their car. Catalan was the companion of Agnès' father on an expedition into the Amazonian rainforest during which her father died. Catalan believes that the statuette is one of three which hold the secret to an Amazonian treasure. Adrien arrives in time to see the Indians abducting Agnès, the only one who knows the location of her father's statuette, and he pursues them to the airport where he steals a ticket and boards the same plane.

Adrien tells the pilot that his fiancée has been abducted, but Agnès has been drugged and does not recognize him. The pilot plans to have Adrien arrested when they reach Rio de Janeiro, but Adrien eludes the police upon arrival. With the help of Sir Winston, a Brazilian bootblack, Adrien rescues Agnès. They retrieve the buried statuette, but the Indians steal it from them.

In a stolen car provided by Sir Winston, Agnès and Adrien drive to Brasilia to meet Senhor de Castro, a wealthy industrialist who possesses the third statuette. On the way, they come across the Indians' car with Catalan slumped inside; after picking him up, they drive on to Brasilia.

At a party in their honor, De Castro takes Catalan to his strong room to assure him of the statuette's safety, and Catalan, who planned the museum theft, murders him and steals the statuette. By the time Adrien discovers the body, Catalan and the Indians have abducted Agnès again and escaped in a seaplane. Adrien steals a plane and follows.

In a floating jungle cafe run by Lola, the woman who financed Catalan, Adrien learns that Catalan murdered Agnès' father and that Agnès is being held in a boat. Rushing to the boat, Adrien hangs onto the side as it heads upstream and finally docks. While Catalan goes to the underground location of the treasure, Adrien knocks out all of Catalan's accomplices and rescues Agnès. Catalan finds the treasure, but an explosion set off by a nearby Trans-Amazonian Highway construction crew causes him to be buried with it. Adrien and Agnès flee the jungle and arrive in Paris in time for Adrien to catch his train back to his garrison.

Production
De Broca stated that initially nobody wanted to produce the film and it took him six months to find a producer and then five months to write the script.

Following the success of And God Created Woman (1956) which grossed over $4 million in the United States becoming the biggest foreign-language film in the country at the time. This led to Hollywood film companies began co-production pacts with top foreign film producers in countries such as Italy, Germany and France. Among the early production companies to help fund some foreign production companies were Columbia Pictures and United Artists. United Artists first following the financial success of Jules Dassin's Never on Sunday (1960) with two more Greek-themed films with Dassin's Phaedra and Michael Cacoyannis's Electra (1962). They then followed it up by seeking out French New Wave-related directors with commercial potential, specifically Philippe de Broca and Louis Malle. Film historian Remi Fournier Lanzoni noted that around the mid-1960s in French cinema, the French New Wave directors began incorporating more "regular" productions, including some more commercially-oriented films into their productions. United Artists became the biggest backer of French films during this period. For de Broca, two films were made: That Man from Rio (1964) and Up to His Ears (1966) while Malle made Viva Maria! (1965).

The film began shooting on May 16, 1963.

It concluded filming on August 2, 1963.

Release
That Man from Rio was released in France on February 28, 1964. The film drew 4,800,626 spectators to become the fourth biggest success of the year in France, just behind From Russia with Love, The Sword in the Stone and The Troops of St. Tropez.

Reception
the Monthly Film Bulletin reviewed and English-dubbed version noted that the "One may feel that [de Broca]'s inconsequential wit is better suited to the smaller, more parochial atmosphere of his earlier films, but here he is involved in a big budget production aimed at a huge audience, and perhaps we ought to be grateful that so much of his personal style has survived, even in the carefully dubbed and slightly shortened American version now presented." The review noted that the film was "beautifully organised" and that "it always keeps the chuckles rising even if they seldom break into real guffaws." and praised the two leads, specifically Belmondo who "outdid Douglas Fairbanks in agility, Harold Lloyd in cliffhanging, and James Bond in indestructibility". The New York Film Critics Circle named That Man From Rio as the Best Foreign Language film of 1964.

Andrew Sarris of The Village Voice gave the film a negative review. While finding the scenes of Paris and Brazil made for pleasant viewing and that Belmondo and Dorleac were full of charm and talent, the film was still poor stating that de Broca was "parodying the thriller when there is no evidence that he could make a decent one." and that "the big advantage of a parody is its self winding alibit for a director, who can pass off his own mistakes as the excess of a genre."

Legacy
At the 37th Academy Awards, Jean-Paul Rappeneau, Ariane Mnouchkine, Daniel Boulanger, and De Broca were nominated for an Academy Award for Best Writing (Story and Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen, for their work on That Man From Rio. The award went to S. H. Barnett, Peter Stone and Frank Tarloff for their work on Father Goose (1964).

De Broca spoke about the film in 1971, stating that he made it "for political reasons. To be free, to have the money to make what I wanted to. To do this, I needed a very big success." and that he felt that "It is a vary naïve film. I think that is why it worked […] I was not in love with it. It was the kind of movie I wanted to see when I was fourteen."