THE STORY OF A CHEAT (1936)

At a street café in Paris, a middle-aged man (Sacha Guitry, at right) is writing his memoirs of being a scoundrel. As a youngster, the son of a grocery store owner, he is caught stealing money from a cash register and is sent to bed without dinner; as it turns out, the mushrooms served at dinner were poisonous and the next morning, he is the only member of his family left alive. A cousin takes him in and embezzles money from Guitry's inheritance, so the boy runs away and becomes a worker at a hotel where Serge, a dishwasher, gets Guitry involved in a plot to assassinate the Czar. The boy (never named, only known as The Cheat) turns him in to the police. In a hotel in Monaco, working as an elevator boy, he dallies with a countess who gives him a gold watch (and in a short break from the flashbacks, we see the countess encounter the Cheat in the present day at the café and, not recognizing him, admitting to having given away 217 gold watches in her time). He winds up at the front in WWI where he spends time at a "semi-brothel" and is wounded in the leg. His later adventures include a brief fling with a female jewel thief, a job as a croupier at a casino, a brief marriage to a gambler, and a possible menage-a-trois before he decides to give up cheating…or does he? This fairly frothy comedy, directed and written by its star, is delightfully amoral in allowing its hero to get away with all manner of illegal behavior and remain a likable character. Most of the film consists of voiceover narration by Guitry with only the occasional character getting any dialogue. Partly due to this, few of the other actors are memorable. Though the narration felt a little gimmicky at first, I got used to it fairly quickly. The opening credits have Guitry's voice introducing each actor by name on the film's set, establishing an amusing, almost surreal, atmosphere. Guitry was a prolific playwright, actor and director, though accusations of collaboration with the Nazis during WWII hurt his reputation. The only other Guitry film I’ve seen is QUADRILLE, a romantic comedy about a love triangle which had a similar atmosphere. I think I’ve got a couple more to watch on my Eclipse/Criterion boxed set, coming up soon. [DVD]