General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20269 min read

Stavisky

Stavisky... is a 1974 French-Italian historical drama directed by Alain Resnais, written by Jorge Semprún, and starring Jean-Paul Belmondo as Serge Alexandre Stavisky, the con man and financier whose exposure in January 1934 set off a political scandal that nearly brought down the French Third Republic.¹^•² The film follows Stavisky through the final months of his life as his financial empire collapses, intercut with the arrival in France of Leon Trotsky, another exiled Eastern European Jew, and it closes on the aftermath of Stavisky's death.³^•⁴

Key fact	Detail
Director / writer	Alain Resnais; screenplay and dialogue by Jorge Semprún¹
Cast	Jean-Paul Belmondo (Stavisky), Charles Boyer (Baron Raoul), Anny Duperey (Arlette), François Périer (Borelli), Michael Lonsdale (Dr. Mézy), Claude Rich (Inspector Bonny), Gérard Depardieu (the young inventor)¹^•⁵
Key crew	Cinematography Sacha Vierny, music Stephen Sondheim, editing Albert Jurgenson, production design Jacques Saulnier⁶
Production	Cerito Films, Les Films Ariane (Paris), and Euro International Film (Rome); producers Georges Dancigers and Alexandre Mnouchkine¹
Release	France, 15 May 1974; runtime about 115 to 120 minutes depending on the print⁷^•⁸
Honors	Charles Boyer, Best Supporting Actor, New York Film Critics Circle 1974; Special Prize of the Jury, Cannes 1974⁹^•¹⁰
Reception	79% on the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer (14 reviews); US gross of $12.0K¹¹

Spoilers

Plot

France, July 1933 to January 1934. Serge Alexandre Stavisky (Jean-Paul Belmondo) is staying at the Hôtel Normandy in Biarritz, living large on credit and charm. His great scheme is already in motion: he has sold 40 million francs' worth of worthless bonds to ordinary French workers through the municipal pawnshop of Bayonne, using forged paperwork and well-paid friends in high places¹⁶. He waters the press, bribes the police, and keeps up the appearance of a legitimate financier, a practice he calls "watering the plants"¹⁷. The film's first scene, running beside his story until both men are thrown out by the same frightened state, shows Leon Trotsky receiving asylum in France¹⁸.

Around Stavisky are the people who make his act possible: his wife Arlette (Anny Duperey), a German actress he lifted out of obscurity; Baron Raoul (Charles Boyer), the aging aristocrat who sponsors him and believes in him completely; his accomplices Borelli (François Périer) and Mézy (Michael Lonsdale); and inspector Bonny (Claude Rich), the policeman who knows exactly what he is.

The film tells this story sideways. Characters keep turning to the camera in tight close-ups, speaking lines that seem to address the audience, until Resnais reveals late in the film that they are testifying before the parliamentary Commission d'Enquête at the Palais Bourbon in April 1934¹⁷^•¹⁹. The episodes we watch are not an omniscient history but the subjective memories of the witnesses, each remembering their own Stavisky¹⁹. There is even a moustache gag: Serge in 1926 wears one, Serge in 1933 does not, until he peels it off, a con man's disguise hiding inside the film's own continuity¹⁷.

The film's most famous move comes late, when a flashforward reveals Stavisky's fate in five sweeping shots a full twenty minutes before the film shows us the dramatic context of those shots. Snow, a chalet in Chamonix, police at the door, a body. The viewer has seen the ending before they know how it happens, so the last stretch of the film plays as an approach to an image already fixed, like a man walking toward his own photograph²⁰. Resnais, the director who built Last Year at Marienbad out of scrambled time, uses disruptive flashforwards here the way other directors use suspense¹⁷.

Meanwhile the walls close in. The bond scheme is exposed, the press turns, and Stavisky, whose power has always rested entirely on the perception that he is powerful, finds the perception gone²¹. He flees. On January 8, 1934, police find him dead in his Chamonix refuge, apparently a suicide by gunshot¹⁹. The film refuses to settle the question the newspapers fought over: suicide, or a killing dressed as one²¹.

The death detonates the country. The scandal brings down two ministries: Chautemps resigns, and Daladier falls after the riots of February 6, 1934, when police kill fifteen right-wing demonstrators and Gaston Doumergue becomes Prime Minister¹⁶^•¹⁸. The film ends with Trotsky deported from France, the two Russian "problems" of the story, the swindler and the revolutionary, both disposed of by a Republic that needed scapegoats more than truth¹⁸^•¹⁷.

Characters

Serge Alexandre Stavisky (Jean-Paul Belmondo) is the con man at the center, a Jew from the fringes of French society who has forged, charmed, and bribed his way into finance and politics. Belmondo, cast against his breezy gangster image, plays him as charm stretched over panic, a man who cannot stop performing because performance is all he has.

Arlette (Anny Duperey) is his German wife, the one person with whom he half-drops the act. Their scenes, in French and German, carry the film's warmth and its unease, since even intimacy here feels partly staged. Erna Wolfgang is the link between the Stavisky story and the Trotsky subplot.

Baron Raoul (Charles Boyer) is Stavisky's old-world friend and sponsor, an aristocrat of serene elegance who is completely taken in by him and follows him into ruin²². Their conversations are a duel between the France that believes in limits and the adventurer who believes there are none.

Borelli (François Périer) and Mézy (Michael Lonsdale) are accomplices and associates who end up testifying before the inquiry, each offering his own version of the man. Inspector Bonny (Claude Rich) is the policeman who knows the truth and becomes his adversary.

Interpretations and controversies

The disputed ending is the film's deliberate center. The real Stavisky's death in January 1934 was contested from the day it happened, suicide or political assassination, and Resnais keeps it contested²¹. Roger Ebert read the film as being about two things, truth and death, both of which Stavisky avoids at any possible cost²². Critics have also read the film as a study of Jewish identity: Stavisky asks Erna "Why broadcast that you are Jewish?" and she answers, "Because I am... Because when I look at the trees, roses, sky, I know I'm Jewish," while his father's advice was "Be average so they forget you"¹⁸.

Sequels, prequels, and universe

None. The film stands alone, though its structure deliberately echoes screenwriter Jorge Semprún's screenplay for Costa-Gavras's Z, with a third-act parliamentary hearing supplying the background¹⁸.

The historical Stavisky

Serge Alexandre Stavisky (1886–1934) was a Russian Jew born in what today is Ukraine who emigrated to France as a child with his dentist father and reinvented himself under the more aristocratically French-sounding name Serge Alexandre.¹²^•² By the late 1920s he was known in France as "the king of crooks" and had moved from gigolo work and organized crime into international-finance shell games, selling worthless investments with the help of political and police protection.²^•⁶ The film's plot turns on the scandal of the false cashier's bonds (fraudulent promissory notes sold as safe investments) of the Bank of Bayonne, uncovered by Inspector Bonny, who accused Stavisky of diverting millions of francs.⁷

The real scandal was one of the largest of the Third Republic. Stavisky was found dead in January 1934 with a bullet hole in his right temple and a gun in his left hand, having shot himself in a Chamonix chalet as police arrived; the death triggered street riots, shootings, a general strike, and the fall of two governments, and it weakened France in the years before the Second World War.²^•¹²^•⁵^•¹⁵ The film covers roughly November 1933 to January 1934, the last months of Stavisky's life.¹²

Production and style

Resnais made Stavisky as his first feature in six years, a lavish production awash in period detail and opulent Art Deco sets.¹²^•⁸ He cast Jean-Paul Belmondo, then one of France's most popular stars, a choice that surprised observers because Resnais had previously worked with less well-known actors; Resnais explained that what interested him was "the legend," and he warned before release that the film would not be political and would contain no revelations about the affair.¹

The score is by Stephen Sondheim, a rare film assignment for the composer, written in a Gershwin-like idiom.⁶^•¹¹ The film opens with Trotsky arriving in France to seek political asylum, a framing that lets Resnais contrast two Eastern European Jewish figures treated very differently by the French state: the swindler, protected for years by politicians and police, and the revolutionary, granted asylum only so long as he stayed out of French politics.⁴^•¹²

Themes

Resnais treats Stavisky as a performer and a man of constructed identities. The Harvard Film Archive's synopsis describes him as "an actor, a professional performer whose decadent, unsustainable lifestyle mirrors the fatal joie de vivre of Europe between the wars," and the Cinémathèque française reads the film as a reflection on self-staging and the manufacture of legends.⁸^•¹ Stavisky's many aliases mean different characters call him by different names throughout the film.¹²

The film also engages the antisemitism and xenophobia of French society and the role of the press in inflaming the scandal; the scholar Naomi Greene argued that, far from ignoring the historical context, the film prompts reflection on divisions in French society and on the power of the media.¹³ The threat to European Jews is personified by Erna Wolfgang (Silvia Badescu), a young German Jewish actress who moves in Trotsky's circles.¹⁴

Reception

The film was shunned at its 1974 Cannes projection, and Belmondo later said the critical reaction to Stavisky was the only time reviews had kept him awake, complaining that critics reproached him for making a swindler sympathetic.¹ Pauline Kael, reviewing the film in The New Yorker in January 1975, wrote that it had been made "as if vitality would be a sin against art" and found Semprún's intricate plot purposeless.²^•¹¹ Other critics responded more warmly: Roger Ebert called Belmondo's work his most complex and probably his best performance, and the New York Times's Nora Sayre described it as a spell-casting mood piece and one of the most rewarding films of its year.⁹ Charles Boyer, as the aristocrat friend who never fully grasps Stavisky's betrayal, received the New York Film Critics Circle award for Best Supporting Actor and a Special Prize of the Jury at Cannes.⁹^•¹⁰ The film later appeared on the National Board of Review's Top Foreign Films list for 1975.⁹

Later availability

Powerhouse Films issued a limited-edition Indicator Blu-ray in the UK and US on 20 July 2026, with a 4K restoration from the original camera negative, archival interviews with Resnais and Sondheim, and a 36-page booklet limited to 4,000 copies.³ Reviewers praised the 1.66:1 restoration's sharpness and color.¹²

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Films by genre, form, and subject › Documentary and biographical films › Biographical films of political, royal, military, and criminal figures › Criminal and outlaw biopics

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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