“The eponymous Messieurs de la Santé (santé means health), far from being practitioners of the healing arts, are rather denizens of Paris' Prison de la Santé, embodied in this wise-cracking comedy of avarice, ethics and easy fortune by Raimu as Jules Tafard, the shifty financier who escapes from La Santé to amass a new fortune under the guise of running a corset shop and under the alias Gideon. Raimu's brief stay in prison is the only reference to La Santé in the movie, but since the title's Messieurs is both polite and plural, and since the prison guard mentions that they have a lot of bankers on the premises, we can lightheartedly extrapolate the translation to mean ‘Those Hoity-Toity Jailbirds...(y'know, the ones who swindled honest folk like you and me and get candlelit dinners and port wine in their cells...).'
“Ces Messieurs de la Santé is an unabashed star vehicle for Raimu, (Marius of the Pagnol Trilogy and) the French screen's leading scene-stealer and premier character actor of the Thirties and Forties.... Ces Messieurs de la Santé affords Raimu the opportunity to be appropriately, gloriously hammy, simpering obsequiously to the ferret-eyed proprietress of the corset shop, trading winks with Edwige Feuillère as the stultified daughter-in-law who yearns to trade whalebone for mink, clucking indulgently over Monique Rolland's blonde tootsie whose role model is Joan Crawford in Grand Hotel, and doing a silver-tongued job of manipulating everyone in sight to a frenzy of greed. As a collection of Thirties-movie-types, the characters in Ces Messieurs owe equal parts to Hollywood and the Boulevard comedy tradition, and the resulting hybrids are fast, funny shorthand sketches defined by quips and clothes.
“One element of the broad social caricature in Ces Messieurs is as troubling to the contemporary viewer as it is indicative of the mood of the French public in 1933: the big-money swindlers who are spoofed in the film are Jews.... If the viewer of 1981 is able to laugh at the blatantly anti-Semitic stereotyping, it's only because the petit bourgeoisie of the era, to whom the film was directed, are parodied far more mercilessly as models of hypocrisy and acquisitiveness.” --Alicia Springer, Museum of Modern Art (excerpt from “Rediscovering French Film,” available at PFA)