!1000 Thrills 1000!

That Man from Rio. Sssh. Out of a shadow a shadow glides, a sinister shape that stands up like a man but treads as softly as a jaguar. Stealthily the figure slips past the guard as he closes the main gate of the Musee de l'Homme in Paris; silently the figure vanishes along an aisle. Some minutes later the museum guard hears the crash of shattering glass, and away he runs to find out who is stealing what. Some minutes after that the police stand pondering a curious coincidence. The object stolen from the museum, a religious effigy, and the weapon used to eliminate the faithful guard, a poisoned dart, were both made by pre-Columbian Indians in the jungles of Brazil. "The Maltecs were a mysterious people," somebody murmurs portentously and then goes on to add, "Who knows? A few may have survived, and now they have come to reclaim their god!"

Go ahead, groan. Up to this point, Rio unreels like a bad French imitation of the standard filler thriller Hollywood produces for the shrunken-head set. But beyond this point, groans turn to giggles and giggles to guffaws. Made by Philippe de Broca, a young French director (The Five-Day Lover) of stunning esprit, the film turns out to be a clumsy but almost continually hilarious parody of the typical next-earthquake-please, throw-away-the-script-boys-this-is-an-action picture.

Director De Broca's technique is to assemble several hundred stock movie situations and fire them at the screen like soggy old lemons. In hysterically rapid succession his hero (Jean-Paul Belmondo):

Sees two ice-cold chocolate Maltecs cream his sweetie pie (Franc,oise Dorleac).

Chases the trio with brio to Rio.

Ducks a barrage of poisoned darts.

Squeezes through a tenth-story window.

Rescues his drugged darling.

Loses her to one of those mad scientists.

Pursues her upside down in an airplane.

Bails out.

Falls crunch into the craw of

A crocodile--what else? Much else, and all of it shrewdly calculated to make the customer laugh out loud at all the lousy movies he has ever seen and at the same time have a wild and wonderful time watching them again.

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