The Stavisky scandals were the Keating-gate of the 1930s in France. Resnais' film is about the downfall of a grandiose swindler, Alexandre Stavisky, and of an even grander swindle, the all's-well image of pre-war Europe as it rotted within. Financial pirate and theatrical entrepreneur, Stavisky manipulated both the frivolity and the government corruption. As a closing act, he flooded France with fake vouchers, which closed the banks, started riots, brought down the government. (Resnais develops a parallel plot, the exile in France of Leon Trotsky, whose fate was curiously linked with that of his fellow Russian-Jewish emigré.) Jean-Paul Belmondo is cunning as the strangely soulful con of whom Collette wrote, "He excelled at having no face." Andrew Sarris: "Resnais' questing, passionate intelligence and his bias for chronicles sliding into the past and future have pitched Stavisky into an engrossingly ambivalent mystery, but one nonetheless in which an enigmatic personality is able to define the character of an age."