Go to the Archive indexAvec: Jacques Tati, Huguette Hué, Janine Villa, Robert Redford, Phillipe Noiret et les autres.
Fear not, ‘Buzzing’ isn’t descending into an ‘art-mag’, just a French filmic setting for the most filmed cyclemotor of all, Le Solex. Eat your hearts out, riders of Mini-Motors and Cyclemasters, but it remains a fact that the only cyclemonster to make a career in films was the Solex.
The first Solex to be ridden to effect on film in other than a background rôle was the 45cc model mistreated by French comic Jacques Tati in the ‘50s ‘Mon Oncle’. For non-cinéastes, Tati was one of the few manifestations of a French sense of humour, a bumbling, gangling figure who played on the inability of humans to overcome the very real hazards posed by inanimate objects. The Solex was mistreated but continued to run, just, with Tati pedalling away in a mac, trilby hat and pipe, his visual trademarks.
Huguette Hué? Oublié, forgotten, as the French say, though pictures of this actress on her 330 exist.
Naturally, the French have ‘soap’ series just like us and a famously remembered one was ‘Janique Aimée’, shot in black and white in the 1960s. The heroine was Janine Villa who successfully reconciled the twin objectives of appearing dressed in the height of fashion - fur coat and high heels in winter; low-cut blouses, short skirts and high heels in summer - and transportation by riding a 2200 most photogenically whilst on the way to meet her lover. Very French.
Over to New York and Robert Redford. He played the clean-cut hero of ‘Three Days of the Condor’ (The book was ‘Six Days of the Condor’ but that’s Hollywood!) who rode his 3800 through the city traffic to his office, which he finds full of dead men, a machine-gun gang having just departed. Through the ensuing attempts by Redford to avoid the same fate as his workmates the Solex remains, chained to the railings at the front of the bureau. Max von Sydow is the villain; it’s a good film, watch it if you can.
Better yet is ‘Les Ripoux’, marketed in Britain as ‘Le Cop’. Ripoux is back-slang for Pourri, which means ‘rotten’ in French and ‘Les Ripoux’ is about a couple of corrupt cops; the older, Phillipe Noiret, a great and under-rated French actor, systematically leading his new, young inspector Thierry L’Hermitte into crime, but in a cheerful way. The race to the betting shop is unmissable.
In this film, the Solex is only a silhouette shot against some railings in the background of a sequence where Boisrond (Noiret) shafts his former sidekick into jail. This illustration is almost mirror-image of that shot, taken from the top of the steps, not the bottom. It can be bought from the bouquinistes adjacent to the St Michel fountain on the left bank of the Seine in Paris. I must go again, I need another copy.
Mr Champ’s wardrobe: Oxfam
Assistant to Mr Champ: Keith Walker
Mr Champ’s Solex by SINFAC, Courbevoie, France
First published: April 1994