Les Affaires sont les affaires (1942)
Directed by Jean Dréville

Film Review

Part morality play, part social satire, Les Affaires sont les affaires is one of those films that seems destined to be relevant to any audience that watches it.  It is the second film adaptation of a celebrated stage play of the same title, written by the great playwright Octave Mirbeau, first performed in 1903.  (Otis Turner directed the first film version, entitled Business is business, in 1915.)  For the original play, Mirbeau was inspired by the Dreyfus Affair, which came to epitomise the widespread corruption and capitalist excesses that tainted the declining years of the Third French Republic in the latter part of the 19th Century.  At the time the film was made, in 1942, France was under Nazi occupation, and so it can interpreted as a thinly veiled critique of the Vichy government and those who opportunistically profited from their alignment with the Nazi overlords.

The film was directed by Jean Dréville, one of the finest French filmmakers of the 1940s, although he is often overlooked today, despite having made such memorable classics as La Cage aux rossignols (1945).  An exemplary auteur and patriot, Dréville chose to have nothing to do with Continental, the company that was controlled and generously financed by the Germans, and instead worked on lower budget productions for smaller independent companies.   Ironically (given its subject) Les Affaires sont les affaires was made on a ludicrously tight budget, and it was a small miracle that the film was ever completed.  It was shot in just thirteen days and the production team had no choice but to cut costs to the bone, for instance using paper instead of fabrics where possible.  Thanks to the immense creativity of Dréville, his set designer and cinematographer, the end result shows no sign of pennies being pinched, and it comes close to matching what Continental achieved on a much, much larger budget.

The great actor of stage and screen Raimu was originally considered for Isidore Lechat, the role that had been played to great acclaim in the original stage production by Maurice de Féraudy.  When Raimu proved to be unavailable, Charles Vanel was cast in his place - and it is hard to imagine anyone investing more in the part and making the character more believable.  In what is almost certainly the highpoint of his film career, Vanel succeeds in creating one of the truly iconic villains of French cinema; his Isidore Lechat perfectly encapsulates the money-obsessed parvenu whose tireless pursuit of riches destroys his humanity and ultimately makes his life a meaningless sham.  And yet the character is far from being a one note villain and, at the end of the film, Vanel also makes us feel an extraordinary degree of sympathy for him.  Lechat is a flawed Faustian figure, the victim of a rampant capitalist system who scarcely merits the tragic ending that Fate has contrived for him.  Nearly seven decades on, the film still has a horrible resonance, reminding us that the capitalist demon still has to be tamed...

Film Synopsis

Through his single-minded pursuit of wealth, Isidore Lechat has become one of the richest men in France, a fact to which his vast country estate is testament.  He is renowned and feared for the ruthless way in which he conducts his business deals, never allowing sentiment to distract him from his aim, which is to make as much money as he can without risking a term in prison.  Wealth, however, is not enough for Lechat;  he also want social standing.  To that end, he intends to marry his daughter Germaine to the son of a nobleman, Melchior de Porcellet, who has fallen under his power.  What he does not know is that Germaine has a secret lover, one of Lechat's own employees...