Le Magnifique OST

In 1973, Bebel was back with director Philippe de Broca, with whom he had already worked in 1962 in the film Cartouche, and then in 1964 in The Man from Rio. He joined him again in 1975 with “L'Incorrigible”. A pair who made meta cinema without knowing it, decades before OSS 117, Jean Dujardin's version. Bob Saint-Clar as Hubert Bonisseur de la Bath's big brother. Special mention for Jacqueline Bisset, a cult actress, from Richard Lester's “Knack” to François Truffaut's “La Nuit américaine”.

The film's soundtrack by Claude Bolling succeeds marvellously in navigating between the first and second degree, without ever sinking into the heavy-handedness of “fantasy music”. For the record, Claude Bolling is none other than the chief composer of the women's group Les Parisiennes and of a hundred or so film scores, including that of Borsalino (with Delon & Belmondo), which is certainly the best known. He is above all a genius of French jazz who manages to give the impression of casualness and familiarity with his talent, even when you hear his music for the first time. From the very first track on the album, “Tatiana”, postcard images of Mexico come to mind, “Tatiana” evokes the character played by Jacqueline Bisset with a lightness and sensuality not devoid of humour. Bolling plays with the codes of film music without ever losing a certain communicative jubilation. Bolling succeeds in recreating the world of escape imagined by François Merlin, an obscure author of railway station novels who escapes from reality through Bob Saint-Clar, his paper hero. With the soundtrack of “Le Magnifique”, Bolling equals the Anglo-Saxon masters of the easy-jazz pop genre such as Henri Mancini. Of course, fans of jerks to dance to at the ambassador's parties will be delighted by the composition, “Pop Mod”. A title that even today makes the Anglo-Saxons, inventors of the term loungecore, desperate to own an original Bolling vinyl. Much more subtle than it seems, Claude Bolling's soundtrack is understood as the soundtrack to the highly unrealistic and fantastical adventures of Bob Saint-Clar.