Mille milliards de dollars (1982)

Paul Kerjean (Patrick Dewaere), a senior reporter at the newspaper La Tribune, receives a phone call from an anonymous informant, who arranges to meet him in an empty parking lot. The caller tells him that industrialist and politician Jacques Benoît-Lambert, known as “JBL” (Robert Party), may have taken bribes to sell the company Électronique de France, which he has just been appointed to run, to the American multinational GTI (Garson Texas International). Using the informant’s license plate, Kerjean identifies him as a man named Bronsky. After investigating further and confirming the accusations by questioning JBL’s betrayed wife and Walter (Charles Denner), the private detective she hired to follow her husband and his mistress, Laura Weber (Anny Duperey), Kerjean publishes his article. It causes a huge sensation and sparks a scandal. The day after it is published, Benoît-Lambert is found dead in his car, with a bullet in his head. The police conclude that it was suicide. Returning from a weekend in the city where he began his career and married Hélène (Caroline Cellier), from whom he is separated and with whom he has a son, Bastien, Kerjean discovers that the industrialist was actually murdered. He begins to realize that he was manipulated into destroying Benoît-Lambert’s reputation and making it look as though he had taken his own life. Determined to uncover the truth, Kerjean continues his investigation, seeking Laura Weber’s help, among others. He learns that JBL had no intention of selling Électronique de France to GTI and was assembling a dossier proving the American multinational’s past: it sold weapons to Nazi Germany during the Second World War. But a secret organization working with GTI, having learned of Benoît-Lambert’s plan, decided to deal with the problem. As the journalist delves deeper into his investigation, his life and those of his loved ones are threatened. After his son narrowly escapes a fatal fall in an elevator, Kerjean asks Hélène to take the child to the countryside for their protection. When Kerjean returns home, he finds the informant, Stan Hankins (whom he had identified as Bronsky), pointing a gun at him. Working for the organization, Hankins has come to retrieve the incriminating dossier that the journalist obtained from Holstein, a former executive in GTI’s Austrian branch. After typing a fake letter on Kerjean’s typewriter, he is about to kill him and make his death look like a suicide. Kerjean realizes that Bronsky/Hankins manipulated him solely to discreetly eliminate JBL, who was standing in the way of the takeover, and to make his death appear to be a suicide brought on by the scandal. Kerjean, who had hidden a pistol, grabs it and shoots Hankins several times. The journalist decides to hide in a hotel near the city where he began his career, and where he had spent his honeymoon with Hélène, in order to write an article entitled [title missing], revealing the entire scheme. Hélène finds him and decides to help him write it. Kerjean calls the editorial office of La Tribune to offer them the article for publication. But the organization has made Hankins’s body disappear and left the fake suicide letter at Kerjean’s home, so the reporter is turned down, discredited by inconsistencies in his account. He begins to doubt himself, until Hélène finds a solution: she arranges to have the article published in the local daily where he used to work and whose director, the kindly Guérande, he has stayed in touch with. A special edition devoted entirely to Kerjean’s story is then printed in several hundred thousand copies, using up the entire paper reserve of the provincial newspaper. This episode rekindles the relationship between Paul and Hélène.