release, American audiences had moved on to counter-culture or boundary-pushing cinema, and La Grande Vadrouille was completely ignored and ultimately forgotten. release in 1969 under the uninspiring title of Don’t Look Now… We’re Being Shot At! By the time of that belated U.S. While La Grande Vadrouille (which translates as The Great Promenade) stood as the biggest earner in French box office history for 42 years, it received a paltry “blink and you’ll miss it” U.S. What? You’ve never heard of La Grande Vadrouille? Well, I guess that’s not surprising. This trend birthed several bloated, 2 hour-plus “race” or “chase” comedies including Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines (1965), The Great Race (1965), The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming (1966), and, of course, La Grande Vadrouille (1966). Based largely on the success of It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963), the all-star, epic comedy became a popular genre for a brief period in the 1960s.
