L'homme orchestre (1970)

Joining Evan Evans’s (Louis de Funès) contemporary dance company is like entering a religious order. Gaining weight and having a love life are forbidden; the dancers must devote themselves body and soul to dance, and are ruled with an iron hand. When one of his dancers decides to leave the troupe because she wants to get married, and being married is incompatible with her job at Evan Evans’s company, Evan Evans holds auditions with the help of his nephew Philippe (Olivier de Funès) and his assistant Françoise (Noëlle Adam), hoping to find a rare gem to replace her. He is captivated by Endrika’s (Puck Adams) talent and enthusiastically brings her into the troupe. Like her fellow dancers, Endrika must be completely devoted to dance. And yet one of the dancers—and no less than Françoise herself—is enjoying a love life right under Evan Evans’s nose. When he finds out, he sabotages the budding romance by taking advantage of Philippe’s naïveté: Philippe has made recordings of a conversation between himself and Françoise in which she tells him off. Evan Evans uses the recordings to make Françoise unknowingly break up with her lover, Franco Buzzini (Franco Fabrizi). During a tour in Italy, Endrika is forced to collect her son, who has been placed with an Italian foster family. She has never told anyone in the troupe about him. Unable to find another foster family quickly, she decides, on Françoise’s advice, to use a letter to make Evan Evans believe that the child is his nephew’s, from an affair he had during one of the company’s previous tours in Italy. Evan Evans then demands an explanation from his nephew, wanting to know whether it is true and who the child’s mother was. Philippe does not deny it. The child must be his, and the mother must be a young Sicilian woman (Paola Tedesco) he had an affair with. Evan Evans decides to visit the young woman’s parents to get to the bottom of things. When he arrives at their home, he is horrified to discover that not only is the baby not hers, but that she did indeed have a little girl, whom he ends up responsible for and is obliged to take back to the hotel. Evan Evans again demands an explanation from his nephew, this time wanting to find out who the little boy’s mother could be. Philippe thinks it must be the maid of a Roman marquis (Franco Volpi). Evan Evans goes to see the marquis and learns that he married his maid, who has never had a child. Confused, he returns to the hotel. Philippe has no idea who the little boy’s mother could be. Evan Evans and Philippe find a foster mother to look after both children, and smuggle them out of the hotel inside huge drums. When Endrika, Françoise, and the other dancers discover the children are missing, they think they have been kidnapped and alert the Italian police. It does not take long for the police to find Evan Evans and Philippe and question them. They struggle to explain to the commissioner (Marco Tulli) how they came to be transporting two babies in drums, but fortunately the arrival of the dancers and the little girl’s mother clears things up, and everything ends happily, with the announcement that his nephew is to marry the Sicilian woman.