After years of hearing many cinema buffs here in France putting Guitry down for the filmed-theater aspect of his first films and finding some of these films hard to sit through myself, I came across a quote from Mae West that Guitry's "Roman d'un tricheur" was one of her favorite films. So I decided to keep trying.
"Roman" was more inventive than the previous films, as if Guitry had taken his contemporaries' criticism to heart, but a bit predictable for 21st century expectations. Yet it was fascinating to see Guitry falling in love with the means of expression that cinema had to offer him after he had lambasted the medium when talkies first came out.
This exploration continued in "Les perles de la couronne" and now reach their pinnacle in "Remontons les Champs Elysées," truly his most beautiful black and white film. The framework of a teacher telling students about his fore-bearers through the evolution of Paris' most famous street foreshadows the tone of Cocteau's future personal interventions in some of his best films. The fact that Guitry the actor is a teacher here justifies his talkativeness, and perhaps this frees Guitry the director to glide, sweep and whirl the camera around the lovingly created sets-- at some point the viewer wonders if Ophuls had something to do with the filming. Jump cuts are employed with the same elegance that would highlight Goddard's work at the end of the century. All of this to serve a comic and dramatic structure where humanity outweighs a kind of patriotism that never degenerates into chauvinism. This is thanks to Guitry's affectionate criticism of the foibles of those who inhabit his country and create its evolution. One of his best films and one of the best films of all time.
