“Jacques Tati plays the role of a mailman in a small French village in his first feature film. At a fair, he sees a film about efficiency in the American postal system and mocked by his villagers for his own archaic means of delivering the mails, takes his newfound information and decides to outdo the highspeed workings of the mechanized American system.

“‘Jour De Fete mixes comedy of all kinds - gentle rustic humor, pure slapstick and satire on the modern craze for speed. Tati was a mime before becoming a film-maker and this film recalls silent screen comedy in its reliance on visual humor. Tati's music hall training has enabled him to master the essential of all screen comedy: the art of timing his gags. This work is an isolated one in the French production of the forties. It heralded no new school of comedy and four years passed before another film of Tati's appeared, but Jour De Fete was sufficient to mark out its director and star as one of the most original talents in the history of the French cinema.'