Philippe De Broca seems to have been schooled on the films of René Clair, Harold Lloyd and Mack Sennett-with a bit of Fanfan la Tulipe thrown in-but his tongue-in-cheek actioners have all the reckless thrills of the real thing. The Bond-like antics of That Man from Rio, executed with balletic precision, take one's breath away, but Belmondo is more Harold Lloyd than James Bond, a dare-devil in spite of himself. He is a hapless soldier on a week's furlough who becomes caught up in the old pith-helmet archeological mystery-adventure involving a "Maltec" statuette (what else?) stolen from the Musée de l'Homme. A persistently astonishing chase takes him from Paris to Rio and the surrealistic cityscapes of Brasilia in search of the jungle where his kidnapped girlfriend (Françoise Dorléac) languishes. That Man from Rio enjoyed enormous critical and popular success (New York Times critic Bosley Crowther wrote, "De Broca mingles the real and the fantastic for a most beguiling exaltation of the absurd").