"Schpountz" stands for simple-minded. Just as people would say in Marseille: "he is a fada" (a crackpot), you can say: "he is a schpountz"...
"To make people laugh when on stage or on screen does not mean that you are humbling yourself, quite the opposite. To make laugh those who are back from the fields with their hands so hard that they can no longer close them, those who come out of their office with their small chests that no longer know what fresh air feels like, those who are back from the factory with black oil in the cuts on their fingers...
To make laugh all those who will die, to make laugh all those who have lost their mother, or will lose her...
Laughter is not some sort of ridiculous and coarse convulsion, but something human which God may have given men to console themselves for being intelligent."
Marcel Pagnol.

Le Schpountz

Production

Producer: Les Films Marcel Pagnol.
Script, dialogues and direction: Marcel Pagnol.
Visuals: Willy Faktorovitch.
Sound: Marcel Lavoignat and Jean Lecocq.
Music: Casimir Oberfeld.
Editing: Suzanne de Troye.
First public screening: Paris, April 1938.
Running time: 2h02.

Performers

Fernandel - Irénée Fabre
Orane Demazis - Françoise
Fernand Charpin - L'oncle Baptiste
Robert Vattier - Astruc
Jean Castan - Casimir Fabre
Odette Roger - La tante Clarisse
Léon Bélières - Meyerboom
Maupi - Le barman
Charles Blavette - Martelette
Henri Poupon - Le grand acteur

Story

Irénée, a young and somewhat mythomaniac grocery assistant whose head has been gone to by cinema, is confident that he will become a famous actor. He meets the members of a film crew who have a cruel joke in store for him... Full of hope, he appears at the studios...