Monsieur Rene

Film director, Oscar-winning actor, fiction writer and playwright Ustinov delivers a lively tale of the misadventures of a Geneva retired concierge, Monsieur Ren . As the president of the International Union of Concierges and Hall Porters, the idealistic widower decides that he and his comrades in hotel service, who in their duties find themselves privy to important and scandalous secrets, should pool their wealth of information and use it to fight evil-doers. Of the rather inept but colorful group he organizes, the most vivacious is housekeeper Agnes Schanderbach. Through Agnes, Ren gets information about an illegal arms sale being perpetrated by a Mr. Ivanov from Kazakstan and the gay emir of Djabbadieh. But the police chief of Geneva, who has been investigating Agnes for years, thwarts the group's plans. During the Nazi occupation, Agnes's mother was expelled from Switzerland to Germany, but managed to leave Agnes behind. The three military men who handled Agnes's mother's deportation all later died mysteriously of arsenic poisoning, and now Agnes confesses to the murders. Meanwhile, Ren 's nephew and his girlfriend purloin Ren 's memoirs and sell them to an English tabloid. Ren reluctantly makes a deal with the tabloid and a publisher, allowing an unscrupulous ghostwriter to add scandalous experiences to the manuscript. When the sensational book becomes a top seller with a movie tie-in, and Ren gets unexpectedly rich, he hires detectives to establish Agnes's innocence. Multi-talented Ustinov's spirited farce is full of ""pain sublimated into... irony"" and possesses the wry charm of a relic from another age. (Nov.)