The Story of a Cheat is considered by most critics to be Sacha Guitry's cleverest film; certainly, it provided the finest showcase for his unique talents. Guitry wrote, directed and played “seven or eight” (no one seems sure) parts in the film. Truffaut and others credit Guitry in this film with inaugurating the “narrated film” or “narrated dialogue” technique that gave birth to the playback or flashback. It opens at a Paris café, where a white-haired Guitry, framed in mysterious black, begins writing his memoirs, and reading them aloud. The rest of the film is enacted in pantomime to this narration. It seems that our narrator is a rogue and a gambler--a professional cheat. The inspiration for his career came to him as a child, the night he was forbidden mushrooms at dinner as punishment for cheating and became the sole survivor of a family of 12. The picaresque story that follows “is willfully chaotic, underscoring the irrational nature of life--the game of chance--the unexpected situations.... The film (is) interspersed with philosophical reflections, improbable and fantastic quirks of fate....” (Bettina Knapp, Sacha Guitry)