The Big Day

Jacques Tati is a tall, gangling Frenchman who moves like a badly-controlled marionette and possesses a real talent for taking pitfalls with the least possible grace. A veteran of the music halls, Tati practices a kind of humor which is not at all subtle, Gallic, or witty, but still enormously funny.

In The Big Day, his first motion picture, the French comic brings all his talents into play as the bicycle-borne letter carrier of a small village. The picture is a one-man show, made up of a series of episodes held together by little more than its comedian's abilities. He uses almost no dialogue for his effects, but in such scenes as an epic battle with tottering flag pole, and a drunken wrestling match between the postman and his bicycle, no words are necessary.

Half way through, the picture does pick up a loose plot. After watching a movie about mail delivery in America, the letter carrier decides to modernize his own haphazard methods. But when he takes his job seriously, he scatters leisurely groups of chickens, geese, and villagers in all directions as he races through his route. In the end, American efficiency looses out to the slower pace of France, and peace returns to the village. But the interval of madness, while it lasts, is very entertaining.

Together on the program with The Big Day is a film on Pablo Picasso. Although the short is marred by an overblown commentary, it presents well-photographed selections which well illustrate Picasso's development. Most interesting are some shots of the artist at work. One sequence, in which Picasso takes a vase fashioned of soft clay and with a few strokes of his hands turns it into the figure of a dove, is a small miracle of creation.