It's official, "Rabbi Jacqueline" won't dance. The sequel to "Rabbi Jacob" will not take place, announced Sunday the screenwriter Danièle Thompson, who had begun work on a second part. In an interview on France 2, she denounced "a kind of censorship that exists today". "There is no longer this freedom, and it's a shame because humor has to explode all the time and everywhere," she regretted. "We have to be very careful not to offend sensitivities," she also lamented.
Already the screenwriter of "The Adventures of Rabbi Jacob", released in 1973 and directed by her father, Gérard Oury, Danièle Thompson confirmed that she had "started working on a possible sequel". Already announced in 2016, this second part was to focus on Rabbi Jacob's "generation of children", with a woman as the main character. It was to be co-written by Danièle Thompson and comic book artist Jul (Silex and the City, Lucky Luke).
'Shaking things up'
Great success of popular cinema, with 7.3 million admissions at the time of its release, just fifty years ago, "The Adventures of Rabbi Jacob" told the tribulations of a racist industrialist, Victor Pivert (Louis de Funès), confronted in spite of himself with a settling of scores between terrorists from an Arab country, and forced to disguise himself as a rabbi to sow his pursuers. The cast included many talented supporting roles: Henri Guybet, Claude Piéplu, Jacques François, Popeck, etc.
Released a year after the hostage-taking of the Munich Olympics in 1972, and a few weeks after the Yom Kippur War, the film had already been at the heart of a controversy. In New York, filming was disrupted by Orthodox Jews opposed to the project, Le Figaro recalls. Worse: to protest the release of the film, Danielle Cravenne - the wife of the producer in charge of promoting the feature film - had hijacked a flight Paris-Nice on October 18, 1973. Armed with a rifle and a fake pistol, she was killed during the GIPN intervention.
"We were very nervous when the film was released," Thompson said Sunday. We were aware of shaking things up, and we were walking on eggshells." "There are a lot of lines that we cut because it was not possible," said the screenwriter, also author of several hits, including "La Grande vadrouille", or "La Boum", adding that many of these dialogues "would no longer be broadcastable today".