The Magnificent

Francois Merlin (Jean-Paul Belmondo) is a Jean Bruce type writer of pulp espionage novels (he has written 42 so far) and about half of the film plays in his imagination, where he is the world-renowned super-spy Bob Sinclair (The name of the character is never seen written in the film. While some people write his name "Saint-Clair," the way it is pronounced in French sounds like Sinclar; in the English-dubbed soundtrack the surname is "St. Cloud"). Christine (Jacqueline Bisset) is a sociology student who lives in Francois' building and is interested in the novels, but in the writer's imagination she becomes Tatiana, his paramour, while the pompous and rich publisher of his novels, Pierre Charron (Vittorio Caprioli), doubles as the great villain of the spy novels, the Albanian secret service's head Karpov, who in a memorable scene of the film threatens to cut off one of Tatiana's breasts. Christine is clearly fascinated with the handsome spy Bob Sinclair, an unrealistic and idealized hero, who is the very opposite of his creator: a clumsy, frustrated divorced man who barely makes enough money to get by. However, when she is befriended by the rich and vain publisher who looks down upon his poor hack writer, she realizes her mistake, and after a party where he tries to seduce her, she flees him and falls asleep on the landing outside the writer's flat, where he finds her in the morning, clad apparently only in a T-shirt and embraces her for a happy ending. In the final scene, Francois throws over the balcony his last manuscript, freeing himself from his character and his imaginary life.