On February 7, 1934, the French Ministry of the Interior and the Paris Police Prefecture banned the showing of newsreel footage of the previous day's mêlée by right-wing royalists, war veterans and members of the anti-semitic, nationalist, anti-republican Action Francaise movement, who rioted to bring down the Daladier government over the Stavisky affair. The riots left 17 dead and 116 wounded. One Parisian cinema, Reginald Ford's Cineac Theatre, defied the censorship to show footage of the riots by the reactionary forces, which had been caught on-camera by French and foreign newsreel photographers.
The movie was in the main competition at the 1974 Cannes Film Festival, but was very harshly received by the critics. Jean-Paul Belmondo claimed that this was the only movie he made where the reviews hurt him. As a consequence, he stuck to more mainstream commercial movies afterwards.
First out of three collaborations between director Alain Resnais and Gérard Depardieu, which was an unknown young actor at the time.
Alain Resnais's preferred title for this movie was "Biarritz-Bonheur", but the distributors successfully lobbied for it to be renamed to "Stavisky", which Resnais didn't want as this implied it was about the Stavisky affair. He was able to add "..." at the end, to suggest that the movie was about more than the scandal.