Jo

Jo is a 1971 French black comedy directed by Jean Girault, adapted from Alec Coppel's 1958 stage play The Gazebo, which had already been filmed in Hollywood in 1959 with Glenn Ford and Debbie Reynolds. Louis de Funès stars as Antoine Brisebard, a successful comic playwright, while Claude Gensac plays his wife Sylvie, a celebrated actress. When a blackmailer calling himself Jo threatens to expose Sylvie's family tie to a notorious criminal, Brisebard decides to murder him. Posing as a writer researching a crime play, he picks the brain of a lawyer friend about the perfect killing and intends to conceal the body beneath the foundations of his new pavilion. His scheme unravels when he learns the dead man was an imposter and the genuine blackmailer was killed somewhere else. Worse, shoddy building work ruins his hiding place, forcing him to shift the corpse while Inspector Ducros, played by Bernard Blier, steadily closes in on him.