The Last Boulevardier

IT STARTED WITH a Criterion Collection closet picks video that featured Justine Triet, a director most recently known for the movie “Anatomy of a Fall.” Criterion invites filmworld-related people of renown to swipe DVDs from their closet while discoursing about their choices, and Triet selected Paul Mazursky’s “An Unmarried Woman,” Soderbergh’s “sex, lies, and videotape,” and Antonioni’s “La notte” before spotting “Presenting Sacha Guitry,” a four-DVD set (part of Criterion’s Eclipse Series, which features overlooked movies) and exulting over Guitry’s classic films.

Good enough for me! I found a copy of that collection and, not knowing what to expect, started with “The Story of a Cheat,” which Guitry wrote and directed in 1936. Unlike the many films he developed from his own plays, this one came from his only novel. Right from the beginning it declares itself a different kind of story, most of it told through flashback and narration as we see Guitry’s character slip through a number of disguises as he makes his dishonest way through French society.

For a man who scorned cinema, insisting that theater was the only viable form of such entertainment, he threw himself onto the screen with surprising and delightful innovations, enough so that he’s credited with influencing directors from Truffaut to Hitchcock to Welles – and it’s easy to draw a connection from Guitry’s use of narration to what Welles did in “The Magnificent Ambersons.” Truffaut, himself a huge, declared “Guitry is Lubitsch’s French brother.”

Two of the movies in this set – “Désiré” (1937) and “Quadrille” (1938) – are taken from his plays, which means that many in the cast came from the stage run, and it shows in the facility with which the dialogue flows. And with Guitry in their midst, that dialogue is going to be delivered quickly and crisply.

The fourth in the set is “The Pearls of the Crown” (1937), his eighth talkie in three years. Written for the screen, it tells the story of seven exquisite pearls, three of which have gone missing and are traced through four centuries of history. It’s largely fiction, although Guitry delights in weaving actual personages and events through the several films he eventually created dealing with views of history. The movie not only rockets back and forth among its different eras (with Guitry in four different roles) but also does so in three languages – French, Italian, and English.

Where to go from there in my Guitry pursuit? While pondering that, let’s note that his was born in St. Petersburg in 1885. His father, Lucien, was a famous French actor who was running a theater in Russia at the time, but he returned to Paris in 1891. Young Sacha proved a terrible student, constantly held back, so he abandoned the schoolrooms when he was 17 and determined to follow in his father’s footsteps, his father’s opposition notwithstanding.

By the time he was 20 he’d written a hit play; not long after that, he discovered that he himself best inhabited the leading roles he created. His work was very much in the light-hearted Boulevard tradition, where infidelity was celebrated amidst dizzying plot twists and crackling dialogue.

James Harding’s biography of Guitry – the only English-language bio to date – is titled “The Last Boulevardier,” recognizing the theatrical tradition in which Guitry worked. Named for Paris’s boulevard du Temple, where a number of theaters clustered, it was a style that blossomed in the late 19th century that celebrated adultery-driven farce. (See Marcel Carné’s wonderful “Children of Paradise” for a look at the beginnings of this tradition.) Among the many playwrights associated with this tradition are Georges Feydeau, Marcel Pagnol, Edmond Rostand, Jean Anouilh, and Victorien Sardou. Noël Coward can be seen as an across-the-Channel version.

Sacha’s fame soon eclipsed that of his father, and by the 1930s he was one of the most celebrated figures in France.

Despite his professed scorn for the movies, he picked up a camera in 1915 and captured an array of his country’s most celebrated artists at work. Thus we have brief portraits of Renoir, Degas (who had to be filmed on the sly), Saint-Saëns, Monet, Anatole France, and Sarah Bernhardt, among others. “Ceux de chez nous” (“Those of Our Land”) was a series of silent snippets to which, decades later, Guitry added narration.

But he didn’t just enter the world of the talkies – he plunged in, writing and directing twelve feature films before the decade was out. My search for more uncovered another collection, “Four Films 1936-1938.” “The New Testament” (“Le nouveau testament”), “My Father Was Right” (“Mon père avait raison”), and “Let’s Make a Dream” (“Faisons un rêve…”) all date from 1936 – a busy year! – and are very much filmed plays, but not at all static. Again, the cinematography keeps the eye interested, and the performances are top-notch.

“Let’s Make a Dream” is a three-hander, starring Guitry, his then-wife Jacqueline Delubac, and beloved French comedian Raimu (you must see him in “The Baker’s Wife”), although there’s a prologue that presents an array of French stage stars as if at a cocktail party, for no other reason I can suppose than to show them off. But once the story rolls into the inevitable love triangle, Guitry gives himself a lengthy monologue that’s one of the most deft and hilarious pieces of writing and acting I’ve ever seen.

The collection is completed with one of Guitry’s several historical tales, in this case the story – or at least Sacha’s version of it – of the most famous street in Paris, as “Remontons les Champs-Élysées” (“Let’s go up the Champs-Élysées”) from the 16th century, when Marie de Médici ruled the country, through the rein of Louis XV and beyond, framed by sequences with Guitry as a schoolmaster enchanting his pupils with this saga. And, as is often the case in this kind of story, Guitry plays a number of other roles as well.

Alongside the bravura filmmaking, you’ll enjoy the way he sometimes plays fast and loose with opening credits. To open “Story of a Cheat,” after signing his name on a large sketch pad, Guitry walks through the studio, introducing actors and technical staff – something he would revisit in “La Poison” in 1951, about which more in a moment. “Désiré” starts with Guitry declaring, “I made the film we are about to present” before taking us through a photo album of cast and crew. “Je l'ai été 3 fois!” (“I Did It Three Times!”), from 1952, shows cast and crew arriving at the film studio using a variety of transportation methods, including airplane.

“La Poison” was written for Michel Simon, an absolutely unique actor whose hangdog face doesn’t prepare you for his excellent work. In this movie, he’s a man who longs to poison his wife, and successfully does so, thanks to excellent, inadvertent advice from his lawyer. This movie is available on its own as a Criterion release. Simon also starred in Guitry’s “La vie d'un honnête homme” (“The Virtuous Scoundrel,” 1953), playing twins – one a wealthy miser, the other an amiable bum, allowing Simon to show us more virtuoso work.

That one’s not as easily available, but I found it in one of those corners of the Internet you’re usually advised not to visit. A more straightforward source of more Guitry films is moviedetective.net, which offers an excellent, well-chosen selection of movies on DVD-R, usually for $11.50 apiece. That’s where I found the original, three-hour version of Guitry’s “Napoleon” (1955), which unfortunately was cut down to less than an hour-and-a-half and badly dubbed before its American release. I’ve been helping myself not only to more Guitry titles from that site but also more of Michel Simon’s work.

Guitry’s legacy may have dipped into obscurity, at least in the U.S., but his plays are still being revived in France and his movies are a joy to discover. Louons cet homme extrêmement talentueux!