"Guitry's next historical extravaganza perfected the genre he had created: he goes still further into fantasy, into disordered invention. He leaves the spectator constantly hanging on the narrator's words, stimulating and satisfying his curiosity with a hundred asides, anecdotes, and unexpected developments...the most acrobatic and unpredictable of history lectures." (Jacques Lourcelles, Dictionnaire du cinéma) Guitry, as a Paris schoolmaster, tells the story of the famed Paris boulevard, the Champs-Elysées, from its beginnings in 1617, as a road cut by Marie de Médicis through marshes and woods, through its garish bourgeois splendor under Napoleon III (played by you-know-who), to the present. The premise is that all of the personnel, from Louis XV to Marat, are blood relatives of this teacher who shares every bit of their amorous natures and patriotic poesy. It was about Champs-Elysées that Graham Greene wrote, "How unbearable these films of M. Sacha Guitry would be if they were not so successful."