Gérard Oury's La Grande Vadrouille – very weirdly translated as Don't Look Now We're Being Shot at – is one of the top grossing films in the history of French cinema, although this was a huge budget movie in no small part due to Terry-Thomas's enormous demand. The film is set in occupied France in 1942, when a British fighter plane is shot down in an air raid and the occupants parachute to Paris. Two are imprisoned, but the other three, Reginald Brook, or 'Big Moustache' (Terry-Thomas), is rescued when he lands in the Zoo de Vincennes; the second, Claudio Brook (Peter Cunningham), lands when the house painter Augustin Bouvet (Bourvil) is at work; and Alan MacIntosh (Mile Marshall, lands on the roof of L'Opéra Garnier, finding refuge with Stanislas Lefort (Louis de Funès).
The main problem is how to transport the 'enemy' to neutral territory, although this will involve a huge number of capers: multiple disguises, misunderstandings, two heterosexuals sleeping in the same bed as the enemy, many more cases of mistaken identity, coding issues in Turkish baths not registered in, say, La Vérité si je mens, the 'superior' Stanislas pick-a-backing the 'inferior' Augustin, and so on.
Apart from a number of areas in Paris, Beaune (Côte-d'or) and Vézenay (Yonne) are among the towns featured in this film, which is both very popular and well worth watching (at least more than once).
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