Les Dents longues (1952)
Directed by Daniel Gélin

Film Review

Alexander Mackendrick's Sweet Smell of Success (1957) and Billy Wilder's The Front Page (1974) are far better known but Daniel Gélin's Les Dents longues (1952) offers an equally authentic insight into the nasty world of the career journalist.  This was the first and only film that Gélin directed - surprising given how well it turned out.  Based on a novel by Jacques Robert and scripted with flair by Marcel Camus and Michel Audiard, it is a film that offers the most compelling portrayal of a young man's corruption by ambition.  Hence the film's title - the French expression 'Avoir les dents longues', literally 'To have long teeth' (like a shark), means to be very ambitious, and is seldom used as a compliment.

Gélin, a superlative actor as well as (judging by this one film) a more than capable director, gives a superbly nuanced performance as the driven protagonist, here playing opposite his wife at the time, the stunning Danièle Delorme.  The deterioration in the fictional couple's relationship, so poignantly depicted in the film, would be mirrored in the stars' own lives after Gélin's public affair with the model Marie-Christine Schneider, which resulted in the birth of the actress Maria Schneider (star of Bernardo Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris (1972)).  Gélin would himself become a victim of press intrusion, and this may have been a contributing factor in the break-up of his marriage.  For the next half a century, Gélin concentrated on his acting career, leading a busy career on both stage and screen to become one of France's most highly regarded actors, earning his place in posterity in such films as Sacha Guitry's Napoléon (1955) and Gilles Grangier's Trois jours à vivre (1957). If Les Dents longues is anything to go by, he might just as easily have achieved lasting acclaim as a film director, but maybe his teeth just weren't long enough.

Film Synopsis

As he embarks on his journalistic career with a provincial newspaper, Louis Commandeur has high hopes of success, but his illusions are soon dispelled when his editor takes all of the credit for a scoop of his.  Determined to make a name for himself, he takes the train for Paris and persuades the editor on a large circulation daily to give him a job.  Not for him the lowly position of a feature writer; Louis aims to go much higher.  By sacrificing his principles, his loyalties and his family life, Louis finally get what he wants - but at a price that might be too much to bear...