I just saw a Facebook reel depicting six people escaping from German soldiers in WWII. They are in two red gliders that are being pulled by a car. The driver of the car jams the accelerator and runs back to get into one of the gliders. As the Germans approach, the cars go over a cliff and the gliders are launched.
Can anyone identify this film?
[NB: The FB reel is reversed, and the narration is laughable. (The gliders are called ‘airplanes’, and a German airplane is called a ‘fighter jet’.)
Did a bit of searching and found that this is a French comedy called
“La Grande Vadrouille”. Here is a clip of the gliders being launched:
That’s it!
I guess it never made it over here.
Same movie as the Germans riding chairs meme.
Recognized the description immediately, but you beat me to it.
For American readers, this is an all-time favorite movie in France. It was the box office champ for years and years and as I understand it there used to be a national tradition of watching it annually on TV.
It’s a fun, lighthearted adventure about British and American pilots crashing in Nazi-occupied Paris and having to escape back to Allied territory with the help of French locals. It’s beloved because it supports the national mythology where everyone believes they would have participated in resisting the Germans.
I can recommend the movie as being nice and fun. If you ever get the opportunity to check it out, do so. It stars two legendary French screen comics in their only significant team-up. (They’re the ones who have the long scene about walking with ill-fitting shoes.)
I saw the movie many years ago at the Illuzion cinema in Moscow. It was part of a collection of foreign films from many different countries and eras. Some of the movies are dubbed into Russian while others are merely subtitled. A lot of them were brought from Germany to the Soviet Union after 1945 as war booty.
The movie was titled “The Grand March” in Russian and stars Louis de Funès, who was and remains popular all over Europe even though he passed away in 1983. It starts with a B-17 being shot down over Paris and is hilarious!
The literal translation of the French title is “the big stroll,” so that’s not a bad approximation.
It’s certainly better than the title under which the movie was released in the UK:
“Don’t Look Now, We’re Being Shot At.”
It somehow made my think of chitty chitty bang bang
It was released as Don’t Look Now… We’re Being Shot At! in English-language countries, but it’s not clear how widely it was released there. It appears to me that it got one showing in a London movie theater and one showing in a New York movie theater. It appears that the possible distributors in English-language countries looked at it and decided it wasn’t worth it to distribute it.