As Long as You've Got Your Health (Tant qu'on a la santé). Pierre Étaix and Jean-Claude Carrière, 1966.
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Edition screened: Included in Criterion 2-Blu-ray set #655 Pierre Étaix, released 2013. French language with English subtitles. Runtime approximately 77 minutes.
Edition screened: Included in Criterion 2-Blu-ray set #655 Pierre Étaix, released 2013. French language with English subtitles. Runtime approximately 77 minutes.
Summary: No particular depictions of violence toward animals.
As Long as You've Got Your Health is an assemblage of four comedy shorts unified by general Goshwhatisthismodernworldcomingto head shaking. In Part I Insomnia, Étaix’s late-night reading of a vampire novel cross-references coincidental occurrences in his bedroom. Part II The Movies is an extended ticket please/pardon me/excuse me/quiet please routine. Part III As Long as You've Got Your Health lampoons the prescriptions, patients, and practitioners of the medical industry. Part IV Into the Woods No More depicts an urban couple’s inept attempt to picnic in the woods.
This is one of those unsettling instances in which a film and its easily-identified inspiration seem to come in the wrong order. There are plenty of funny sight gags in this Étaix feature, but you’ve seen them all before in Warner Brothers cartoons made at least a decade earlier. Porky and Daffy shaking under the sheets in a haunted castle; Bugs Bunny climbing over annoyed film watchers and jockeying for a better seat; Elmer’s whirlwind problems in crowded restaurants and doctors’ offices; uncountable vignettes of pastoral splendor humorously sullied by modern intrusions. Warner Brothers didn’t exactly invent all of these gags either, but Étaix’s versions are really similar to the animated antecedents.