Borelli, Alexandre's dourly efficient and ever-present lawyer Anny Duperey as Arlette, Alexandre's glamorous wife Michael Lonsdale as Doctor Mézy, Alexandre's physician and friend Roberto Bisacco as Juan Montalvo de Montalbon Claude Rich as Inspector Bonny, the relentless and not wholly disinterested investigator of Alexandre's frauds Charles Boyer as Baron Jean Raoul, a genial right-wing aristocrat who becomes Alexandre's loyal friend Pierre Vernier as Pierre Grammont Jacques Spiesser as Michel Grandville Michel Beaune as The journalist Nike Arrighi as Edith Boréal Raymond Girard as Doctor Pierre Gigi Ballista as Gaston Henriet Yves Brainville as Monsieur de la Salle Niels Arestrup as Rudolph François Leterrier as André Malraux Gérard Depardieu appears in a small role, the first of his several performances for Resnais, as a young inventor of the Matriscope, a device for determining the sex of a child in the womb, to which Alexandre impulsively gives his financial backing. Reception With its high production-values and the popularity of its star actor, the film was enthusiastically received by the public in France, whereas, perhaps for the same reasons, it drew a cool response from many critics who felt that Resnais had betrayed his reputation for intellectual rigour. A British reviewer expressed several of the doubts which were felt by critics: "No one could fail to respond to the elegance of the fashion-plate costumes, the Art Deco interiors, the gleaming custom-built cars, the handsome grand hotels, and so on, all paraded before us to the tinkling thirties-pastiche foxtrot music of Stephen Sondheim... But Resnais's and Semprún's Stavisky is just not a very interesting figure... what he represents to the film's authors is not clear... What the picture does not do is use the Stavisky affair to make any larger comment upon the drift of twentieth-century life, or capitalist society, or even human gullibility... One's ultimate impression of the film is of an immense gap between the sophistication of its technique and the commonplace simple-minded notions it purveys." The theme of uncertainty in a fragmented narrative (previously explored by Resnais among equally elegant surroundings in L'Année dernière à Marienbad) was identified by a more sympathetic American reviewer, though with some reservations about the density of the historical background: "The difficulty of knowing what is true, of discovering what really happened, ripples throughout Alain Resnais's "Stavisky" — a spell-casting mood piece that is also factually frustrating. Ideally, it should be possible to relish this fascinating