The director, screenwriter, novelist, essayist, illustrator and journalist Carlo Rim (1902-1989) described the film’s origins in the following fashion: “It is a macabre farce inspired by a newspaper article from the dark days of 1940. During the exodus, an elderly lady died unexpectedly in her nephew’s car. Seized with panic, the latter hid the body in a carpet, hoping to give her a dignified burial at a later date. Then he headed off through the crowded streets, with his funereal cargo in the boot. That evening, tired and exhausted, he stopped at a hotel for the night. But the next morning, he discovered that his car had vanished!” In L’Armoire volante, the nephew becomes Alfred Puc, a tax collector who lives with an authoritarian elderly aunt who is determined to travel from Paris to Clermont-Ferrand to collect some furniture from her property, despite the chilly morning being unconducive for a journey. The old lady dies during the trip and the two furniture removers hide her body in a wardrobe and then inform Puc; however, in the meantime the truck is stolen. Without the body or the death certificate, Puc cannot inherit his aunt’s fortune, and so he desperately searches for the wardrobe: in a rundown hotel, at an auction, in a theatre that burns down, before ultimately following it into a river.
Characterised by a sparkling and original dark humour and shot in beautiful black-and-white by Nicolas Hayer, the film becomes increasingly surreal and fantastic as it goes on (in one memorable sequence Puc infiltrates almost every room in the hotel to open their wardrobes). It also features a splendid gallery of caricatures (Rim also drew satirical cartoons) – the elderly aunt insensitive to the cold, the disquieting police inspector, the gossipy and suspicious concierge, the hotel maid willing to prostitute herself, the bigots from the Salvation Army, the assassins in the hotel – all of whom are marked by cynicism, hypocrisy, and indifference from which not even Puc (who avidly pursues his inheritance) is immune. Enthused by the project, Fernandel performs with irresistible dramatic zeal. There is also a likely allusion to surrealism: Gaston Modot, the protagonist of L’Âge d’or, plays a thief. In Italy, it was distributed five years later, following censor cuts to the more irreverent lines.

Roberto Chiesi