Mille milliards de dollars (1982)

Paul Kerjean is a journalist on a leading French news weekly, La Tribune. One day, he receives an anonymous phone call revealing that the respected industrialist Jacques Benoît-Lambert is facing financial ruin. Suspecting that he may be on to a sure-fire scoop, Kerjean begins his own investigation and discovers that the businessman is implicated in a fraudulent business deal with the multinational corporation GTI. By stepping in and saving one of Benoît-Lambert's failing business concerns, GTI hopes to gain a foothold on a lucrative foreign market, thereby shoring up its global dominance. Shortly after Paul has published an article exposing this scam, Benoît-Lambert is found dead, apparently having shot himself. Paul is unconvinced by the verdict of suicide and continues his investigation. By interviewing some former employees of GTI he uncovers the terrible truth about the company's far from glorious past, but in doing so he puts his own life in peril.

Henri Verneuil followed up his cogent political thriller I. comme Icare (1979) with a similarly near-to-the-knuckle néo-polar, this time one attacking not politicians or the judiciary but the dubious activities of multinational corporations. Verneuil was ahead of his time in anticipating the downside of globalisation (a word that was seldom heard at the time the film was made) and the concerns that he raises, about the concentration of wealth and power in an ever dwindling number of super-corporations, have become a terrifying reality. In 1980, 'mille milliards de dollars' (one thousand billion dollars) was the turnover of the world's top thirty companies. Today, the statistic is probably even more frightening, with some companies have an income stream vastly in excess of the gross domestic product of most countries. In such a world, where the reins of power are in the hands of just a few dozen company executives, you have to wonder just what is the point of democracy.

Mille milliards de dollars is not only a film that remains highly pertinent to this day, it was also astoundingly prophetic. In 2000 it was revealed that the American computer giant IBM had played a significant part in the Holocaust by selling punch card machines to Nazi Germany, machines that were used for censuses as part of Hitler's purification programme. Just like the fictional company (GTI) portrayed in the film, IBM's pro-Nazi activities were forgotten after the war, and the company was even compensated for damage inflicted by the Allies on its German factories. (The journalist Edwin Black provides a compelling case for IBM's complicity in the Nazis' planned genocide in his 2002 book "IBM and the Holocaust".) Mille milliards de dollars is not a work of fiction. It is a film that is anchored in a sobering reality.

Throughout the 1970s, Henri Verneuil was one of French cinema's most successful mainstream film directors, turning out a string of popular thrillers in the classic French policier mould, the highlights being the slick gangster film Le Clan des Siciliens (1969) and action-oriented thriller Peur sur la ville (1975). Mille milliards de dollars belongs to this series of films but is an altogether more considered piece, one that goes beyond the stock clichés and delivers a well-judged (and generally accurate) critique of the business world. At the time, audiences would have been shocked by the film's exposé of the kind of things that large companies get up to, such as dealing through offshore subsidiaries to avoid having to pay corporation tax back home. Nowadays, no one would bat an eyelid. It's what every profit-conscious multi-national does - global bandits playing the system to their advantage.

In such a morally bankrupt world, where politicians are powerless to act in our best interest and newspaper editors are too keen to lick corporate boots, what we need is an incorruptible moral hero to take a stand against all this money-grubbing chicanery. And who better to play this lone hero than Patrick Dewaere, an actor who brought a Messianic fervour to virtually every one of his film roles? In what is a virtual reprise of the high minded character he played so magnificently in Yves Boisset's earlier néo-polar Le Juge Fayard dit Le Shériff (1977), Dewaere is admirably well chosen to play the maverick investigative journalist who lifts the lid on a very nasty can of worms. At this stage in his career, Dewaere was becoming dangerously close to being typecast as the pathetic loser, so it is interesting to see him return to a more heroic kind of role, another marginal character but one who has great resilience and moral strength.

The irony is that Patrick Dewaere plays a sympathetic journalist, at a time when he was considered persona non grata by just about every reporter in France. A year before he made this film, the actor punched the journalist Patrice de Nussac after he broke his promise not to revel his forthcoming marriage to Élisabeth Chalier. As a result, he was denied interviews promoting his work and had his name excised from film listings (or else abbreviated to the derogatory initials P.D.). Sadly, this was to be Dewaere's penultimate film. In a fragile state of mind after the break-up of his second marriage, he committed suicide just a few weeks before the release of his next film, Paradis pour tous (1982).

Patrick Dewaere shines most brightly when he is surrounded by a cast of comparable talent, and this is certainly the case in Mille milliards de dollars. In addition to some high-profile stars - Jeanne Moreau and Mel Ferrer - there is a mouth-watering ensemble of distinguished character actors - Michel Auclair, Charles Denner, Jean-Pierre Kalfon and Fernand Ledoux. Anny Duperey, who had partnered Dewaere so memorably in the offbeat comedy Psy (1981), and a stunning Caroline Cellier both bring a welcome feminine presence to the film, emphasising the cold brutality of the male-dominated business world in which the hero becomes hopelessly ensnared. In such an impressive cast line-up it is hard to single out one actor for particular praise but Mel Ferrer definitely deserves a special mention for his chillingly authentic portrayal of a hard-nosed company president. Ferrer had had a substantial career in Hollywood and France, but here, in his twilight years, he is at his absolute best, playing a character who could so easily have been the greatest of Bond villains.

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Next Henri Verneuil film:
Les Morfalous (1984)

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