Quartile rating: 7.5/10 · 1 rating
Don Sallust is the minister of the King of Spain. Being disingenuous, hypocritical, greedy and collecting the taxes for himself, he is hated by the people he oppresses. Accused by The Queen, a beautiful princess Bavarian, of having an illegitimate child to one of her maids of honor, he was stripped of his duties and ordered to retire to a monastery.
Delusions of Grandeur is a French farce adapted from Victor Hugo's Ruy Blas, directed by Gérard Oury and starring Louis de Funès. The plot is a solid, if convoluted, period comedy of mistaken identity and class inversion, working well as farce but not exceptionally original given its literary source. De Funès delivers his trademark manic, exaggerated performance with great comic timing, though the overall ensemble is competent rather than revelatory. Cinematography is functional period spectacle — decent production design in Spanish locations but no particularly distinctive visual language. The film's novelty lies chiefly in the pairing of de Funès with Yves Montand and the irreverent comedic treatment of Hugo's melodrama, which gives it a certain unique flavor within French comedy of the era, though it remains squarely within Oury's established crowd-pleasing formula. The ending resolves the farce satisfactorily without surprising or elevating the material significantly.