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Redemption of the criminal-aesthete, "not a matter of morals but of manners." Born behind bars, Vidocq (George Sanders) out of Napoleon's army and into the Saint George church mural. (As his sidekick, Akim Tamiroff plays grasping dragon to this incidental knight.) Jewels at the Marquise's mansion before millions in the bank of Paris, along the way the attention of a lady or two. "The bride of heaven" (Signe Hasso) is more than willing to switch sides, elsewhere "a charming realist" (Carole Landis) enters and exits the story silhouetted behind a perforated screen. "In crime, as in love, there's only those who do and do not dare." A rich evocation of old Europe on a Hollywood sound stage by Douglas Sirk (Ulmer's Bluebeard and Renoir's Diary of a Chambermaid are contemporaneous), an ironic picaresque, "a study of the classics." High society and the underworld as complementary halves, the scoundrel navigates both with monocle and spear. Pet monkeys on de Hooch floors, rubies on garters, virtually a lost Lubitsch. "Sometimes the chains of matrimony are so heavy they have to be carried by three." The double-couple structure from Written on the Wind brings out a tragic side: The cuckold (Gene Lockhart) is the police prefect and the chanteuse's husband, as ridiculous as Inspector Clouseau behind a fake beard and then as splendidly desperate as Robinson in Scarlet Street. (Another transformation sees Tamiroff from squat buffoon to blade-wielding gremlin, resolved on the carousel at the edge of the pond.) An émigré gathering (Arnold Pressburger producing, music by Hanns Eisler, uncredited photography by Eugen Schüfftan) in an early Sirk masterwork, plus a subtle influence on Barry Lyndon. "Monsieur, I bow to your art." With Alma Kruger, Alan Napier, Vladimir Sokoloff, Jo Ann Marlowe, Pedro de Cordoba, Skelton Knaggs, and Gisela Werbisek. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |