A young woman sets the table for her wedding anniversary celebration. Her husband is stuck in Paris traffic. The few remaining errands he has to make only delay him more and more. Happy Anniversary won the Oscar for Best Live Action Short Film in 1963. –Mar del Plata International Film Festival
Pierre Étaix (born 23 November 1928, Roanne, Loire) is a French clown, comedian and filmmaker. Étaix made a series of acclaimed short- and feature-length films in the 1960s, many of them co-written by influential screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière. He has won an Academy Award.
As an actor, assistant director and gag writer, Étaix has worked with the likes of Jacques Tati, Robert Bresson, Nagisa Oshima, Otar Iosseliani and Jerry Lewis, who cast the comedian in his unreleased film The Day the Clown Cried.
Born and raised in Roanne, France, Pierre Étaix moved to Paris in 1954 to work as an illustrator and cabaret performer. He met the filmmaker and clown Jacques Tati, and began to help Tati work on the project that later became Mon Oncle, on which Étaix served as assistant director. Two years later, Étaix made his first short films: Rupture and Heureux Anniversaire; the latter won Étaix an Academy Award for Best Short Subject. The films also marked the first produced screenplays… read more
Pierre Etaix began to build on more elaborate concepts in this Academy Award winning short about a man's Herculean struggle to get home to his wife after a day of preparing for their anniversary dinner. As the world seemingly conspires against him, hilarity ensues. Etaix is at his very best when he keeps it simple, taking seemingly innocuous, every day situations and mining them for comic gold.