La Vache et le Prisonnier

La Vache et le Prisonnier (English version: "The Cow and I") is a French-Italian tragicomedy film from 1959, starring Fernandel and directed by Henri Verneuil, that is based on Jacques Antoine's 1945 novel, Une histoire vraie (A True Story). It tells the story of a French prisoner of war in World War II forced to work on a farm in Germany who decides to escape by walking away with a cow he calls Marguerite (Daisy in English). The most successful film in France in 1959, with over 8 million seats sold, it was also the most successful film of Fernandel's career. Plot Charles Bailly, a French prisoner of war in Germany in the summer of 1943, decides to escape from the farm where he is forced to work and go home to France. Observing that a man with a cow and a milk pail passes unnoticed in the Bavarian countryside, his plan is to take one (whom he names Marguerite) and to walk with her to Stuttgart, where he will leave her and hide aboard a train for France. Their epic journey takes weeks, during which the two meet many people, some sympathetic and some not. They get into many situations, some dangerous and some hilarious. For example, on a narrow pontoon bridge over the Danube, Marguerite will not budge when a company of German soldiers tries to cross.