



‘That Man from Rio’: Belmondo, Brazil and Tintin
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.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.
Read on livemint.com