Five things to know about Max and the scrap dealers

Michel Piccoli and Romy Schneider return to Claude Sautet, to be seen again this evening on France 5.

A fable about Stalinism

Max and the scrap dealers is a novel signed in 1968 by Claude Néron. The story of a police officer who sets a trap for a gang of amateur thugs to catch them in the act. And if Sautet chose to bring it to the screen in 1971 with its author and Jean-Loup Dabadie, his accomplice in writing the Things of lifeit is because this character, ready to do any manipulation to achieve his objective, echoes his own youth as a former communist activist. He who then opposed those who were intoxicated with Little Red Book of Mao and whose certainty of belonging to the camp of good exempted them in their minds from all scruples. Like Max. Sautet therefore saw this Max and the scrap dealers like a fable about Stalinism. And three years later, he will adapt another novel by Nero, The Great Marrade which will become Vincent, François, Paul… and the others.

A Montand-Jobert duo once considered

When it comes to distributing the first two roles of Max and the scrap dealers – Max and Lily, the perverted cop and the prostitute who falls in love with him without knowing his true identity – the producers first envisage a new couple on the big screen: Yves Montand and Marlène Jobert. But both declined, the actress explaining that she refused to play a prostitute. The producers then considered another tandem, glamorous as hell: Alain Delon-Catherine Deneuve. A new double refusal which is not without displeasing Sautet: the filmmaker had another idea in mind…

The Piccoli-Schneider reunion

So it’s Michel Piccoli and Romy Schneider – the bourgeois couple of Things of lifewhich has just put Sautet back on the path to success five years after the failure of The Weapon on the left – who play Max and Lily. Two actors motivated by their roles. It was after reading a one-page synopsis that the second insisted to Sautet to become Lily. And the first arrived on the set with a costume chosen by him from a clothing specialist for plainclothes police officers. This is what we call having a character.

The Things of Life: Discover the creation of this masterpiece by Claude Sautet

One of Philippe Léotard’s first appearances

Max and the scrap dealers features magnificent supporting roles. We see Georges Wilson, Bernard Fresson, François Périer, the singer Bobby Lapointe whom Sautet had already directed in Things in life but also a quasi-beginner. A year after an appearance as an extra in Marital home by François Truffaut, Philippe Léotard found here the first real role of a career which would lead him to the César for best actor for Libra in 1983.

Its author’s favorite film

For criticism, that of yesterday as of today, Max and the scrap dealers appears to be Claude Sautet’s most personal film. And the filmmaker is on the same wavelength. Even if with 1.9 million entries, it is a good distance from the 3 million of Things of life, Max and the scrap dealers will remain apart in his heart. And so shortly before his death in 2000, he re-edited seven of his major films, he barely touched this one. His perfect film?

Death of Jean-Loup Dabadie: a screenwriter in paradise