Adrift in this strange world, he finds a helpful fellow-recruit in his family's worldly-wise chauffeur Joseph.

But nothing can save him from his mental and physical ineptitude, which infuriates his instructors, amuses his fellow-soldiers and humiliates him.

Based on a stage play, the story had been filmed by Jean Renoir in 1928 and also by Fernand Rivers in 1950.

For its third outing on celluloid, the makers adopted a knowingly light-hearted approach to the material, re-using old visual and verbal gags and inserting humorous homages to earlier works such as Vigo's À propos de Nice and Zinneman's Oklahoma!.

There were also cameos for André Mouëzy-Éon, who wrote the original play, for François Truffaut, one of the two directors, and for two stars he used in his films, Bernadette Lafont and Jean-Claude Brialy.