From my point of view Miller is uneven; I disliked for example his tampering with Checkhov in La Petite Lili as much as I enjoyed his Betty Fisher and/or Garde Vue. Now thirty years old The Best Way To Walk probably qualifies as 'middle period' and is no worse for that. There will be those who will see echoes of Ben Gazzara's Jocko de Paris (End As A Man) and point to the similarities between a France Holiday camp and an American Military Academy albeit such comparisons don't really hold water. Irwin Shaw was writing about Summer Camps at around the same time, notably in Voices Of A Summer Day and he was, of course, an ex-counsellor himself but Claude Miller has been reasonably creative in his portrayal of a warts-and-all boys camp in rural France and a particularly intense love-hate relationship destined to end in tears. The acting is uniformly excellent though both leading actors were unable to realise their potential - one died prematurely the other was unfairly typecast as a 'drag queen' and had to watch the work dry up. Released in 1976 this was a refreshing antidote to the left-over pretentiousness of the New Wave and arguably one of the key films of 1970s French Cinema.
Review of La meilleure façon de marcher
