Henri Verneuil is a French-Armenian filmmaker and playwright who began his directing career with comedies starring Fernandel and soon moved into a mastery of crime films that, sadly, aren’t well known outside France. This double-feature of ripped-from-the-headlines political thrillers from Kino Lorber may partly remedy that.
With I … for Icarus (1979) and A Thousand Billion Dollars 91982), one ends happily and one not so much, though we won’t reveal which is which. Both films run just over two hours, and both are smoothly suspenseful entertainments that spin from real-world ideas. Neither is above faking out the viewer with threats that turn out benign or vice versa, and both are obsessed with the architecture of the modern city.
I for Icarus and the Modern Conspiracy Theory
I … for Icarus (I comme Icare, 1979) creates a disorienting sense of déjà vu, not only among viewers who know their conspiracy lore on John F. Kennedy’s assassination but because the film feels uncannily like Oliver Stone’s JFK (1991), a good dozen years ahead of time. Verneuil’s film pulls off the trick without mentioning JFK, instead inventing its own reality as it begins with an epigraph by Boris Vian that translates as “This story is entirely true since I’ve imagined it from start to finish.”
I … for Icarus takes place in an alternate reality whose country is never named, a western democracy where people speak French. The flag, in the French and American colors, features a winged bird (our first Icarian figure) between red and white stripes and a blue rectangle.
The opening sequence finds newly elected President Jarry (Gabriel Cattand), whose name evokes Surrealist writer Alfred Jarry, traveling in an open-topped motorcade through a cheering crowd. We’re treated to a clip of him quoting George Bernard Shaw to the effect that some people see the world as it is and ask why, while he sees the world as it’s never been and asks why not. The editing aligns cameras, telephoto lenses, and rifle sights as mutual metaphors for “shooting”.
Didier Sauvegrain’s character is introduced riding the elevator to the top of a building shaped like a giant combination of an electrode and a stapler. We’ll learn his character is named Daslow, and you’ll get no bonus points for unraveling that anagram.
Daslow receives a call directing him to find a hidden high-end rifle in its case, but when he tries to take the shot, he discovers the clip is empty. At this moment, the TV camera’s cable is disconnected, rendering the camera briefly useless. Never fear; the spectators include an amateur photographer and a second shooter, and both get their jobs done. A mysterious figure shoots Daslow in the elevator, and he arrives at the bottom looking like a suicide.
Skip to one year later. An official committee’s investigation into the assassination has amassed an ungodly number of fat binders filled with facts and testimony declaring that a crazed gunman acted alone and killed himself. One member, prosecutor Henri Volney (Yves Montand, the superstar here), refuses to sign off on the conclusion and creates a sensation by debating the matter on live television. He’ll now take over the investigation on his terms.
Volney quickly learns of the existence of the amateur photographer, a rather mercenary stand-in for Abraham Zapruder called Sanio (Maurice Benachou), who sells Volney a copy of his film after explaining that he’d already sold one to what he’d thought was a news company. Strangely, his 8mm footage turns out to have multiple set-ups and edits with a nice juicy close-up in the middle.
However, film audiences at the time weren’t expected to question such conveniences. This cinematic era is full of scenes where characters watch what’s supposedly a single-camera set-up only to find it professionally strung from many angles, as though audiences weren’t technically savvy. I … for Icarus will give us another example of this phenomenon in a later sequence.
Sanio’s footage reveals several people responding to a second shooter briefly visible in another window of the building, and now we get a fascinating montage of flashbacks revealing how every witness has mysteriously died in the interim, except one unidentified man. The twisty investigation proceeds from there.
One of the most startling segments in I … for Icarus is the recreation of the 1960s experiments conducted by Stanley Milgram on responses to authority. A volunteer is told to administer shocks to another participant and often continues to obey the command like a good little citizen until well beyond the point of cruelty and danger. These experiments are so famous, they’re even familiar to people who know little about psychology.
Because they reveal something so important and disturbing about socialization, and because people cling to any reason to reject the message, some people choose to focus on the “unethical” psych-out cruelty of the tactics, as though ethics aren’t an evolving determination of values by the cultural context. American culture of the time was full of such guerrilla tricks paraded as entertainment, such as the humiliations displayed on Candid Camera (1960-67), an early top-ten-rated example of “reality television”. Making fools of people used to be a common pastime, and still is in politics.
The faux-Milgram sequence in I … for Icarus, in which the researcher is Prof. Naggara (Roger Planchon), is another example where Volney reviews footage that has been magically edited from several angles. Naggara doesn’t explain the experiment until afterward, and when Volney expresses shock and disbelief that people would electrocute each other, Naggara points out that, as an observer, Volney himself didn’t voice any objections until 140 volts.
The point is that Daslow had been a subject like any other; he’s not a psychopath, but he’d follow an order from an authority he respected. This argument pertains to the “Oswald as patsy” theory of Kennedy’s assassination.
The briskly paced I … for Icarus serves as a compendium of counterparts to conspiracy theories about JFK and Oswald, including an allegedly faked photograph, an interview with a shady chief of security (Jacques Sereys), and the presence of an “umbrella man” (Jean Negroni) revealed as a gangster. Coincidence and unlikelihood abound, and that goes with the territory, since coincidence and unlikelihood can be found in the Warren Commission and various official stories.
The film’s point is to provoke questions more than to answer them. Everyone in the I … for Icarus audience understood what was being discussed, and the film received praise and award nods in France.
Although some French thrillers and procedurals began adopting a grittier tone, Henri Verneuil is among those filmmakers who epitomize the smoothly flowing, glossy style more commonly associated with the form. We see this in his left-to-right wipe of the film’s opening credits to the elegant fade-outs.
Verneuil and co-writer Didier Decoin fetishize all forms of technology and surveillance, from huge reel-to-reel machines to live TV monitors to sterile architecture. In two scenes, characters walk into a room and turn on machines playing the seductively sinister soundtrack of Ennio Morricone, reminding us that we’re also spectators of a carefully shot and scored construction.
A Thousand Billion Dollars and the Rise of Corporate Ideology
A Thousand Billion Dollars (Mille milliards de dollars, 1982) subscribes to French fears of being economically taken over by America, much as American films in the ‘80s tapped a fear of being taken over by Japan or Saudi Arabia. Verneuil’s script links this concern to broader predictions on multinational (that is, supranational) corporations consolidating the world’s wealth, and how corporations can indulge mafia-like behavior. The ending arrives at a socko revelation of the historical roots of the modern international corporation.
The flawed hero at the center of this procedural is Paul Kerjean (Patrick Dewaere), a hard-nosed, ambitious journalist for a big Paris paper, La Tribune. In an opening scene clearly channeling Alan J. Pakula’s All the President’s Men (1976), Kerjean meets an anonymous Deep Throat figure (Jean-Pierre Kalfon) in the concrete labyrinth of a parking garage, that oppressive icon of modern automotive culture. Kerjean is intrigued by the man’s vague statements about a wealthy French electronics maven whose debts have been taken care of by a US corporation run by a godlike operator (Mel Ferrer).
It doesn’t occur to Kerjean until too late that perhaps he’s taking the bait too quickly. Soon enough, he finds himself investigating one of those murders that look like suicide within a web of increasingly well-connected power players, not unlike the hero of I …for Icarus.
As in that film, Verneuil and his returning photographer, Jean-Louis Picavet, pay great attention to architectural space and the modern technological accoutrements of travel and communication. People drive around and communicate telephonically like nobody’s business, constantly in motion and contracting time and space, never at ease in their current context.
Kerjean’s interviewees include Jeanne Moreau as the French industrialist’s widow, Anny Duperey as his mistress, Charles Denner as a cagey private detective with many glossy photos, Edith Scob as the mysterious informant’s wife, Michel Auclair as a businessman whose integrity is proven by having been fired, and Jean Mercure as the man who holds the McGuffin of dynamite that everyone wants.
Caroline Cellier provides mild romantic interest as Kerjean’s exasperated wife. As the cranky old small-town editor who gave Kerjean his first job, Fernand Ledoux arrives to illustrate the difference between the interests of a big national paper and a modest little rag. A Thousand Billion Dollars uses a classy piano score by Philippe Sarde, as played by four pianists.
Film writer Samm Deighan provides commentary on both films. On I … for Icarus, she and conspiracy expert Rob Skvarla discuss the parallels with JFK lore and other paranoid thrillers of its era. On A Thousand Billion Dollars, she puts the film in the context of Verneuil’s long career as a popular French filmmaker who is not well known in the US.
Kino Lorber had released both films as Blu-rays in December 2023, and now they’re paired conspiratorially as a DVD double feature under the label Two Political Thrillers by Henri Verneuil.