The Story of a Cheat (1936) is my favorite hidden gem. It’s a film that not many people today know of, written and directed by someone that not many people (especially in America) have heard of, and it is as innovative and delightful as anything I can think of. The picaresque adventures of the titular “Cheat,” and the dazzling cinematic style which the filmmakers use to tell his story, are just as entertaining today as they were when audiences saw them during its first release 86 years ago. I have been showing this film to friends and family for years to help it find new fans, and they always find something to appreciate. I can think of few other films which are as ripe for rediscovery as this one.
Despite its long obscurity in America (where it wasn’t available on DVD until 2010), The Story of a Cheat and its writer-director-star Sacha Guitry were quite influential. This film and its creator influenced everyone from Orson Welles to Francois Truffaut. Even today, Guitry remains in favor with contemporary filmmakers such as Olivier Assayas, who dubbed him “one of the inventors of French cinema.” But this film’s legacy lies not just in how it influenced individual artists, but in how it influenced the crime genre—especially in the medium of cinema—by presenting a model for telling crime stories on screen that were cinematic, comedic, and well-attuned to the inner workings of its main characters’ consciousness.
The Story of a Cheat (which Guitry adapted from his own novel, the only novel he ever wrote) is about the middle-aged, unnamed, titular “Cheat.” He, played by Guitry, spends most of the film in a café doing a fairly unspectacular task: writing. More specifically, he is writing his memoirs, which share the name of this film. His life story (which comes to life as silent flashbacks coupled with wall-to-wall narration), is a rich one. It begins with his boyhood and the darkly comedic deaths of eleven members of his family from poisoned mushrooms. It follows the Cheat’s escape from a Dickensian home life with some grim relatives (who steal his inheritance) to become everything from a lobby boy to a croupier, a soldier, a croupier again, and, finally, a cardsharp. In between he helps foil a plot to kill Czar Nicholas II, devours the works of Balzac, has an affair with a countess, gets married, and acquires a fortune from his years cheating at cards. But despite his eventful life, the Cheat hasn’t seen everything, and he is still in for a surprise or two.
Any film with a plot this eventful is bound to be exciting. But what makes The Story of a Cheat truly memorable is not just the story it tells (or the fact that it tells it all in 81 minutes), but how it tells it. The film’s technical style, which hinges on the Cheat narrating the vast majority of the film, seems designed to thrill and intoxicate you with the pure pleasure of listening to a story. This use of voice-over is so extensive that the Cheat’s voice—a droll baritone capable of talking at the speed of an Olympic runner—seems to dictate the witty tone and fast tempo for this film. It makes you feel like you are at the café with the Cheat as he tells you about another scrape he escaped. It is also important from a narrative perspective because it is, for long stretches of the film, the only voice that we hear. All the flashbacks to the Cheat’s boyhood and previous criminal adventures are silent. During these many sequences, the only sounds come from the score by Adolphe Borchard or Guitry’s sprawling voice-over. A running theme through The Story of a Cheat is the presence of paradoxes, so it is fitting that a core part of its technical style is presenting the bulk of its story as a silent movie with a lot of talking.
Guitry announces to his audience that The Story of a Cheat is going to be a most cinematic experience before his plot begins. One of its first shots is of Guitry standing in front of a white wall. He takes a pen and writes his signature on it in big, looping letters. In voice-over Guitry says, “this film was conceived of and directed by myself.” In less than 10 seconds, Guitry has offered a proto-definition of the auteur theory (namely that one person is responsible for the creative identity of a film) at a time when Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard were respectively 4 and 6 years old. But after making this declaration, Guitry rewinds the film to show him erasing his own signature. This moment foreshadows all the technical trickery which will follow, as well as the playful spirit which will make it such a delight.
Guitry adds another meta frame to this film with his innovative opening credits. Instead of having a card with the names of his cast and crew, Guitry films them on set and introduces them to the audience in his voice-over, often with a witty aside that foregrounds the artificiality of filmmaking. He films his composer performing the piano piece that plays throughout the sequence, cuts to a shot of his sound person in his booth and notes that he looks “like a deep-sea diver,” and even films two of his actors pretending to talk to each other as he acknowledges “they both know they’re being filmed.”
This sequence announces that this film will be fresh, inventive, and full of things that you cannot do in any medium other than cinema. It seems fitting, then, that this sequence would have an influence on a director who would push the medium forward. Orson Welles admired Guitry and seems to have used this scene as a model for his delightful trailer for Citizen Kane as well as the opening credits sequence of his film The Magnificent Ambersons, which also features him reciting the names of his collaborators.
The film’s visual style fulfills the promise of its opening credits. Just a few of the many techniques which Guitry uses to provide the cinematic equivalents of the Cheat’s verbal fireworks are whip pans, archival footage, and other delightful visual effects. One early example of Guitry’s cinematic audacity comes when the Cheat writes about his family. The camera pans around the grocery store his parents own to introduce us to all eleven relatives – ranging from half-brothers and sisters to grandparents as well as an uncle who can’t speak or hear – with whom the young Cheat lives.
Guitry cuts to a shot of them all seated around a dinner table as he pans around to count to twelve in his voice-over. But the mushrooms which his uncle has collected for them to eat are poisonous, and they kill eleven members of the Cheat’s family. In another film, this would be a heartbreaking moment. But in this mischievous one, Guitry depicts this accidental mass death through a special effect in which said eleven relatives simply vanish into thin air, leaving the young version of the Cheat sitting alone at the table. It’s a brilliant moment that shocks and provides darkly comic relief in equal measure.
But it also serves a dramatic purpose—the Cheat would have eaten those mushrooms too, but he was banned from doing so as punishment for stealing from the grocery store’s till. The paradox that his punishment ends up being his salvation is the first thing which sets him on the long path to becoming a criminal.
This cinematic style is also a perfect reflection of the Cheat’s chameleonic nature. The film’s delight in using a dazzling technical style to astound the audience is like the Cheat’s enjoyment in fleecing people at cards. Its ability to apply a wryly comedic tone to anything—to the point where this film can become a comedic travelog about Monaco and Monte Carlo without missing a step—resembles the Cheat’s ability to change his appearance to evade capture. One of the scenes which best expresses how this style reflects the Cheat’s character comes after he has finally become a cardsharp. As he puts on makeup, the Cheat explains how he managed to evade the authorities. As two policemen look on, the Cheat walks out of a door in a wide variety of disguises, each one more ridiculous than the last.
Finally, he steps out of the door and walks right past them with the only face of his that they cannot recognize: his own without any makeup on it. While this moment is intended as the punchline to a funny sequence, it also fits in perfectly with the film’s pattern of depicting artifice as a type of moral good. That may seem like a paradox, but the universe that the Cheat constructs in his memoirs is full of them. His life is saved by a punishment for a theft, he owes his first job to someone who despises him, and his only “legitimate” gambling proves to be disastrous for him. It is a universe in which fate itself seems intent on having a good laugh at the Cheat’s expense.
This opening up and melding of film form does more than build empathy for the Cheat. It gives the film a unique character all its own by being an apt reflection of his consciousness. His love of language is reflected in the film’s wall-to-wall narration. The fact that the people in his flashbacks never talk and do what he describes reinforces that we are seeing memories over which he has complete control. Even minor moments, such as a series of whip pans between Monte Carlo and the Monacan countryside which conveys his passionate love for both, are a reflection of the Cheat’s emotions and beliefs. This and many other techniques make Guitry’s cinematic style feel less like something that you would use to tell a traditional gangster story and more like an expression of a person’s thoughts. To paraphrase a line from the novelist Vladimir Nabokov’s most famous book Lolita (another first person metatext which mostly consists of a memoir written by a criminal), you can always count on a cheat for a fancy cinematic style.
Another thing which sets The Story of a Cheat apart from other crime films at that point in time is how it uses a sense of humor to build empathy for its protagonist. American gangster films of that decade—including but not limited to The Public Enemy (1931) and Scarface (1932)—would have protagonists who turned to lives of crime because of poverty, which is similar to how the Cheat’s rough boyhood leads him to swindle people at cards. These American criminal protagonists could also make snappy remarks that flew as fast as the bullets from their tommy guns. But those characters also had a sense of menace and a love of violence which prevented audiences from fully celebrating them.
American gangster films at that time even killed off their protagonists, which absolved their audiences from relating to them and made them tragic figures. In contrast, the Cheat is a much more comic and seemingly empathetic figure. He constantly makes great jokes, never kills anyone, and always depicts the events that led him to become a type of outlaw as being out of his control.
The Cheat even spends most of the film trying not to become a criminal, and only does so due to the machinations of two women who are smarter and more devious than him. He even finds himself ultimately making a career change that is somewhat similar to that of the French criminal/detective Eugène-François Vidocq, who also wrote his memoirs.
But this more lighthearted portrayal is somewhat more insidious than the portrayal of those malevolent gangsters in American films from the 1930s. The Cheat, as the storyteller, is the one who has all the power over what the audience sees and hears for long stretches of the film. This is accentuated by a scene in which the Cheat says that he likes to imagine soldiers from Monaco marching in reverse, which is an image we then see play out onscreen. The fact that he may be an unreliable narrator is hinted at when he notes that, when he happened to meet his former wife (Jacqueline Delubac, who was married to Guitry at the time) again while wearing a disguise, “she spoke of her life and our marriage in terms that were absolutely untrue.”
The Cheat’s humor as well as the film’s tendency to take his stories at face value (namely by depicting them literally as opposed to showing the opposite, which would have shown that he was lying and created irony) make him more likable than the gangsters played by James Cagney or Paul Muni, and therefore more dangerous. Guitry never digs fully into the dangers of having a likable criminal narrate his adventures in a way which makes him seem like the hero at the expense of his victims, but it is a conversation people have been having about similar films in the crime genre ever since.
The biggest influence this film would have on the crime genre would come, ironically, through how it inspired something that was not a crime film. Truffaut was a big fan of Guitry and said that he deserved to have his name placed alongside that of famous directors such as Max Ophuls and Jean Renoir. He would pay tribute to The Story of a Cheat by having a similar, sweeping use of voice-over in his film Jules and Jim (a comparison noted by film critic Desson Howe).
Truffaut’s film – an energetic tribute to being young and in love—is far from a crime story. This is in the voice-over, which comments on its protagonists’ day-to-day lives and love affair with a woman named Catherine (Jeanne Moreau) as opposed to how they would get away with crimes. Truffaut’s voice-over is not tied to any one character, either, but instead comes from an omniscient point-of-view.
But Jules and Jim would have an influence on the crime genre because of how it would inspire another director when he was making what would become one of his most famous films. In a video for Masterclass, Martin Scorsese noted that the beginning of Truffaut’s film “influenced the style of GoodFellas.” He went on to note how the technical elements of the opening sequence—which includes “the relentlessness of the voice-over” – would be a model for him in creating a film that would have the feeling that “anything can happen at any moment.” That sense of continual surprise, whether it’s the unexpected murder of a bus boy or a surprise dinner with a violent gangster’s mother, is also something that it shares with The Story of a Cheat.
While Scorsese has cited Jules and Jim as an influence, it’s not clear whether he or his co-writer Nicholas Pileggi ever saw Guitry’s film. That being said, it is striking how much GoodFellas resembles The Story of a Cheat. They both follow the life of a criminal from childhood until a type of retirement, features extensive use of voice-over, and depicts him explaining how his schemes worked in loving detail. There are differences between the two films – arguably the biggest being that Hill was a real person—but when you compare them you can’t help but view The Story of a Cheat as a type of Gallic grandfather to GoodFellas. It’s fitting that Guitry’s film would influence Scorsese and Pileggi in a way that was as circuitous as one of the Cheat’s digressions. The enduring popularity of GoodFellas is a reminder that Guitry’s model for telling a crime story—in a way that is cinematic, funny, and with plenty of attention to the inner workings of its protagonist’s mind—is one that is still beloved by contemporary audiences. They should appreciate and embrace this effervescent and engaging film.
