Cinema: The New Pictures: Oct. 10, 1938

The Story of a Cheat (Serge Sandberg). A frowzy middle-aged gentleman sits down in a Paris café, orders a drink and begins to scribble in a notebook. As he writes, he reads aloud or chats, sometimes with the waiter, sometimes with his neighbors at nearby tables. Meanwhile, the screen unrolls aloud the narrative he is telling. It begins as the story of a little boy who was punished, for stealing five pennies, by not being allowed to have mushrooms for dinner. The mushrooms were poisonous toadstools and his whole family of eleven died that night from eating them. "The disaster was beyond my years," says the narrator. "Grief for one at a time, yes. But eleven all at once—I hate to say it but I didn't know where to begin." If it failed to make him sad, the narrator continues, the incident at least enabled him to form an opinion of life. It was a low opinion, but subsequent events did nothing to change it. He became successively a bellhop, an elevator boy, a croupier, a soldier, a jewel thief, a card sharp. Women came and went: the countess in the hotel at Monte Carlo, a beautiful blonde burglar, the wife who won consistently at roulette until he married her, then lost just as steadily. (During the course of his tale, an old lady enters the café and sits next to the frowzy storyteller. He recognizes her for the Monte Carlo countess, but tries to prevent her from recognizing him.) From cardsharping, he continues, he made the sorry error of turning to mere gambling and lost his hard-won savings in honest play. Poor again, he found work in a playing card factory but lost his job because he marked the cards. (At this point the Monte Carlo countess picks him up, suggests that now, since he is elderly and poor, the narrator might wish to become her accomplice in a little genteel safecracking. "Countess," says the narrator, "confide in me no longer. My new calling protects me from all temptation. I am a private detective.") Written, adapted, directed, spoken and in large part acted by Paris' famed Sacha Guitry, told with no other sound but the forlornly witty monotone of the narrator, The Story of a Cheat is a neat, simple and wholly successful cinematic experiment. Made in Paris 18 months ago, awarded prizes all over Europe since then, its U. S. showing was delayed by price difficulties. Last week, with English titles by John Erskine, it finally opened at Manhattan's Fifth Avenue Playhouse, got reviews enthusiastic enough to justify nationwide showing in small theatres. Good shot (a characteristic Guitry tour de force) : the narrator exhibiting the series of disguises by which he was accustomed to fool hotel detectives.