Charles Duchemin is a food critic who travels anonymously to restraurants and bistros to try out their dishes and write a review in his restraurant guide, which can destroy entire establishments. His enemy is Tricatel, the owner of a mass-produced synthetic food who wants to take over the positively reviewed restraurants to sell his bad food there. One day, Charles is confronted by a former owner whom he destroyed when he wrote a negative review, and who forces Charles at gunpoint to eat bad leftover food. As a consequence, Charles is hospitalized and loses his sense of taste. He is further shocked when he finds out his son Gerard secretly works as a clown in a circus. Charles and Gerard find out Tricatel produces food from plastic in the factory. In a TV show, Gerard announces he is taking over the food critic business, while Tricatel is exposed when he refuses to eat his own food.
Legendary comedian Lous de Funes often appeared in movies that are far less legendary and undersized to fit his talents, as it is the case with the culinary comedy "The Wing of the Thigh" which was much more popular during its release date than it is today. It is overall still a good and easily watchable, fun little film about a food critic who loses his sense of taste (interestingly, a similar idea was used in Lee's film "Eat Drink Man Woman" about a cook who lost his ability to taste), that owes 90% of its charm to de Funes' wild outbursts of temperament, yet the director Claude Zidi sadly didn't put nearly half of much effort into his front, since the story lacks inspiration and better jokes, and even feels slightly tiresome towards the last third. The best gag is when de Funes' character Charles anonymously enters a bistro disguised as an American tourist, and finds terrible conditions there: the manager and the cook sit at the table playing card, and only toss the menu at him; the cook's cigarette falls into the dough he was flattening with the rolling pin, but he just keeps flattening it as if nothing happened; while Charles even has to take a sip of wine in a tube to analyze it later on in the laboratory. More of such ideas would have been welcomed. Another good joke is when Charles and Gerard enter the food factory, and are shocked to find out rubber is glued over skeletons of fish and painted green to pass as real food. The subplot involving Gerard working secretly as a clown in a circus didn't really hit any right notes, and thus felt flat. Much more could have been done out of this story, since the writing was as meagre as some dishes Charles tasted, but de Funes was such an institution whose absence left a vacuum in European cinema that one feels sympathy even for his lesser comedies.
Grade:++
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