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EssenceStory Well Deserved Praise

Lovesusti The Worst Film Ever

2freensel I saw this movie before reading any reviews, and I thought it was very funny. I was very surprised to see the overwhelmingly negative reviews this film received from critics.

solidellew Guitry's story of a cheat is an extraordinary depiction of 1936 French society.It chronicles the world of young people leaving the depressed farm areas to seek work in the isolating commerce and industry, a world that the JOC and trade unions were addressing. That two women aided the cheat in his crime shows Guitry's awareness of the problem of more women than men in the population and the consequent rise of the deplorable 'new women'. The cheat is a common place man who relinquishes his life of crime when he discovers he has cheated a man who was injured in the war by shielding the cheat. The hilarious irony in Guitry's art is that the cheat's lifetime of crime has served as an apprenticeship to an employable skill. He can earn a decent living as a security guard.

Gizmo As others have mentioned here, the films of Sacha Guitry seem to have sunk into oblivion in the English speaking world, which is odd since at their best they share much of the same quality and charm as those of Ernst Lubitsch or Max Ophuls, both of whom are still spoken of with deserved reverence.This one might be the most well known of his films, for what that's worth, and is a similar story to Lubitsch's wildly overpraised but markedly inferior 'Heaven Can Wait' - the memoirs of an old rogue's misspent youth. It's a boon that Guitry, working outside of Hollywood censorship, could be much more frank about what his rogue actually got up to - the great weakness of Lubitsch's later film.Much of this film is in fact silent, with Guitry's witty narration being the only speech. There is an excellent performance by Serge Grave as the young Cheat. The best scene is the one where the old Guitry runs into the now elderly Countess whose younger charms he has just been fondly reminiscing over. His discomfort is hilarious.This is not my favourite of Guitry's films - that would still be La Poison - but it's a patchy and a whimsical delight nonetheless. And really, I'm just glad to have discovered all of them.

richard-1787 This movie is really only for Sacha Guitry fanatics. It is basically one long monologue delivered by the narrator, Guitry. We see various characters, but they almost never speak. It is as if we were watching a silent movie to which someone had added a narrative voice track.Yes, some of that narration is mildly clever, and Guitry certainly knows how to deliver his own lines. But the plot is uninteresting, the script only passingly clever.This is very inferior to Guitry movies like Les Perles de la couronne.If you like Guitry's sardonic humor, you will get some pleasure out of this movie. Other than that, I don't see much of an audience for it. I myself will have forgotten it by tomorrow.----------------------------Two years after writing the above review, I've rewatched the movie, and I find that I still agree with what I wrote then. The whole movie is a monologue, with only occasionally funny lines. It all hangs on the sound of Guitry's voice and his delivery of his lines. Yes, he was very good at delivering his own texts. But an 80-minute monologue, and not a particularly clever one, is too much to ask of the power of his delivery or the patience of the audience. Again, really for die-hard Guitry aficionados only.

zetes I've long wanted to see this French classic, and now Criterion has finally given me the chance via their Eclipse label (the box set also includes three later Guitry films, too). I have to say, I was a little disappointed after hearing it mentioned so much as one of the defining films of the era. But it's good. It's the film's central, original technique that gives the film it's fame, I think, but also what ultimately undermines it. The whole story is told from the point of view of a writer (played by Guitry himself) who is writing his autobiography at a café. Most of the film is told in flashbacks, with the gimmick that the author narrates every second of those flashbacks. Any dialogue that happens comes from the lips of Guitry, whether it be his character speaking or another. It's cute - at first. But narration is very difficult to pull off in films. It just so rarely feels necessary, since, unlike in a book, the audience can always see what is happening. A lot of film viewers just plain dislike it, and, with almost any film you see that uses it, you can find someone complaining about it. In The Story of a Cheat, I found the narration initially amusing. But after nearly ninety minutes of it, I have to admit I got bored with the gimmick. The story itself is very frivolous. It's charming, but, in the end, it doesn't equal all that much. It has a similar "champagne on corn flakes" feel that René Clair's films often do, but it isn't anywhere near as memorable as Clair's best French work.