The French-Armenian director Henri Verneuil, though not a household name in the United States, delighted audiences in France for decades with his savvy command of genre and inspired touch with set-pieces. In The Burglars (1971), Jean-Paul Belmondo’s on-the-run jewel thief tumbles down a quarry hillside in a show-stopping stunt of extreme daring. Against this reputation, Verneuil’s journalism procedural A Thousand Billion Dollars (1982) unfolds with impressively little fireworks. The movie proceeds from conversation to conversation—set in offices, living rooms, studies, museums—as the wisecracking reporter Paul Kerjean (Patrick Dewaere), of the buzzy weekly La Tribune, investigates a corporate scandal hidden in plain sight. The film’s opening minutes find Kerjean receiving a tip in the bowels of a parking garage, a tableau of Pakula-esque paranoia that Dewaere charmingly lightens with his skeptical, overworked air. The mysterious informant suggests to Kerjean that Jacques Benoît-Lambert (Robert Party), the notorious and successful chief of a French electronics firm, may not be as financially stable as the tabloids attest.
From there, Kerjean probes a chain of connections that lead him to the gluttonous dealings of Garson Texas International (GTI), an American company pursuing takeovers across the globe. As Kerjean diligently, but unspectacularly, performs his work—ringing doorbells, scouring files, scribbling details on cigarette packs—Verneuil’s film comes to play like a low-key valentine to dogged reportage. It is an immense pleasure to watch Kerjean enter his interviewees’ opulent rooms—each one production-designed to the nines by Jacques Saulnier with liquor carts, plush chairs, and overstuffed desks—and navigate the tenors of the conversations to his ends. Benoît-Lambert’s estranged wife (a one-scene Jeanne Moreau) unsteadily clutches a drink and seems to drift off into space. A private investigator (Charles Denner) receives Kerjean’s queries with a shield of practiced secrecy. At times, Kerjean engages in a verbal dance not with his sources or subjects but with his own bosses, who become increasingly nervous about the sensitivity of his findings. In one of the most charming passages, Kerjean escapes the city and visits the offices of his provincial hometown paper, admiring the issues being freshly printed and gabbing with old-timers about headlines.
Verneuil’s quietly surreal vision of capitalism’s limitless treachery peaks in a trio of flashbacks that flesh out the ghoulish history and internal workings of GTI. In the first, Kerjean reflects on his trip as an invitee to GTI’s annual convention in Brussels. There, he fills a plate from the complimentary buffet while grilling the smarmy GTI chairman (Mel Ferrer) about the terrors of corporate consolidation. In the second, a terminated GTI exec (Michel Auclair) recalls one of the company’s mythically intense financial-results summits—an around-the-table gathering of such imposing visual austerity that it nearly rivals the war room from Dr. Strangelove (1964). Ferrer’s calmly diabolical turn dominates these sections, with the actor toggling between English and French as the business tyrant extols the virtues of expansion and dresses down middle managers whose divisions are underachieving. In the third flashback, Verneuil ventures to World War II, presenting a trial shot in black-and-white that sketches GTI's ties to the Nazi Party.
Across these bursts into the past and Kerjean’s copious interviews, Verneuil obsesses over documentation. He provides numerous close-ups of private-eye photographs, New York Times front pages, and U.S. Department of Justice indictments. The wispily mustached Dewaere supplies the human side to this evidentiary rigor. He hardly ever raises his voice, yet propels the movie with his breezy intelligence and artfully modulated affability. His Kerjean has a marvelous way of rattling off two or three chummy lines, or politely accepting a glass of whiskey, before transitioning to a question that he knows will rile up his interlocutors and pave the way for his next discovery.
A Thousand Billion Dollars screens this evening, February 4, at L'Alliance New York as part of the series “The Ballad of Patrick Dewaere.”
