A Scandal in Paris

Although the story line bogs down a bit and the plot gets a bit thick at times to follow, for fans of George Sanders this film is an absolute must. I cannot imagine anyone else but Sanders in the lead as the con man Eugene Francois Vidocq the thief who rises to become the head of the Paris PD and then gets put in charge of the security at the bank. The better to rob it when the time comes. Even when in the greatest of danger of exposure Sanders is never at a loss for word, wit or wits. The only one who knows the whole story of Sanders is Akim Tamiroff and he won't tell. I cannot and will not spill any of the elaborate plans that Sanders makes, but it involves his ability to con every one so that he is trusted implicitly. One should also take careful note of Gene Lockhart who usually is playing sniveling rats. Here for a change of pace he's a detective who Sanders makes an absolute fool out of. Forget Addison DeWitt and the Oscar Sanders won for playing him, A Scandal In Paris is no doubt his career role. And he looks like he's having such a good time in the part.

This is a story about a real-life criminal turned private detective character - Eugéne Vidocq – set in C18th and C19th France. George Sanders plays the character but unfortunately, things are rushed as we skip forwards and Sanders sleepwalks through the film in a lacklustre manner. We also mistakenly get two comedy characters who are given significant roles – Akim Tamiroff (Emile) as murderous sidekick and loyal admirer of Sanders carrying out duties such as dressing his buddy and generally admiring him, and former chief of police Gene Lockhart who is inexcusably meant to lend yet more comedy to proceedings. Add to that a completely wet fish love interest in the form of Signe Hasso (Therese) and the film is not stacking up well. The best in the cast by a mile is gold-digger showgirl Carole Landis (Loretta) and she boosts the watchability single-handedly. Unfortunately, she is not in the film long enough. Given there is quite a slight storyline to the film, her moments are all memorable whether it be her singing performance (the best moment of the film) or her dialogue delivery and acting gestures which provide the only moments of true comedy. The makers of the film should have made this story more true to life and informed the audience more about this Vidocq character. I have no doubt it would have been a far more interesting story. He has a fantastic legacy and very engaging life story if you read up about him.

George Sanders as Eugene Francois Vidocq, a clever French crook (and a very flimsy representation of the amazing real-life template), is both the lead actor and narrator of this film in which he neatly swindles his way from a lowly prison cell to the top of French society delivering a bounty of aphorisms along the way. The real-life Vidocq began as a rough-and- tumble child criminal and ended up a government minister. Sanders basically delivers the same polished performance seen in numerous other films, from "Man Hunt" (1941), through "The Picture of Dorian Gray" (1945) and "All About Eve" (1950): the cool, cultivated, continental, dry wit with just the right suggestion of the animal beneath. Carole Landis, in what may be her finest role, is both funny and chilling as a self-centered show girl who blatantly uses her beauty to catch wealthy men. Signe Hasso (who looks distractingly like Margaret Sullavan) plays the daughter of the minister of police; she falls in love with Sanders but is as lifeless and damp here as she is vivacious and crackling in "The House on 92nd Street," made the year before. The film is obviously 100% studio made, with painted backdrops to represent the French countryside. But since scenery is not the point here, this drawback can be overlooked. It's an unusual film about an extraordinary man, here reduced to a sort of Sherlock Holmes who strides both sides of the law.

A baby born in a Paris jail, twenty-something adult criminal George Sanders (as Eugene François Vidocq) escapes from a prison with his portly cell-mate Akim Tamiroff (as Emile Vernet). True to form, Mr. Sanders becomes a debonair jewel thief and elegant dresser. Remember, foppish powdered wigs are the height of fashion. Sanders spends time romancing scantily-clad singer-dancer Carole Landis (as Loretta) and love-struck heiress Signe Hasso (as Therese). The former lights up the screen in a fiery shadow dance and the latter likes to swim with her girlfriends in their undergarments... Sanders rises in Parisian society and is effective in some later parts of this overly-mannered, comic-laced crime adventure. However, the much admired character actor is not very engaging through most of the running time. Sanders is miscast as the swashbuckling French rogue. His neatly trimmed, bored, and suave British demeanor simply doesn't fit the part. Some strengths are director Douglas Sirk artfully setting up some scenes, the cute "little sister" performance essayed by Jo Ann Marlowe (as Mimi), and the choreographed acting of "Satan" the pet monkey. In the end, the monkey wins. **** A Scandal in Paris (7/19/1946) Douglas Sirk ~ George Sanders, Signe Hasso, Akim Tamiroff, Carole Landis

Eugène François Vidocq was a VERY peculiar person. Up until 1810, he'd been a career criminal. Then, he turned snitch and began working with the police. None of this is extraordinary. However, eventually, he was appointed Chief of the new Sûreté Nationale (a very famous French police force) as well as becoming the first private detective! Along the way, he became involved in all sorts of intrigues, was briefly jailed and had a few marriages! All in all, he had an amazing life--one that easily could have made an excellent movie. Unfortunately, "A Scandal in Paris" does what many Hollywood films have done over the years---it ignores the facts and mostly fictionalizes his life! And, believe it or not, the fictionalized life is far less interesting!! In fact, the film seemed, at best, ordinary despite starring George Sanders. It looked nice and wasn't terrible....but should have been so much better.

There. That's the gist of it. Though the script is really quite good, the picture doesn't quite come off. Sanders is perhaps too much himself here to be very interesting -- his "ennuyeux" style seems just a little TOO little, here -- which creates something of a hole at the center. On the other hand, the supporting cast, with one exception (see below) is superb. First, Akim Tamiroff at 46 in a superb makeup that makes him look not a day over 25 -- he's Sanders's comic sidekick, who, in the last reel turns surprisingly (but satisfyingly) into his nemesis. It's an amazingly detailed performance, constantly interesting -- and really quite out of his usual line. Signe Hasso is lovely in quite a small role (considering her billing), and Gene Lockhart, Alan Napier, Alma Kruger, Vladimir Sokoloff, and, really, all the supporting cast (including, if I'm not mistaken, an unbilled -- and unaccented! -- Julius Tannen as the President of the Bank of France) are excellent and amusing. The child actress Jo Ann Williams (Kay Pierce of "Mildred Pierce" as well, and the child version of Hedy Lamarr in "The Strange Woman") is excellent, on a par with Margaret O'Brien, even. Superb art direction, too. Unfortunately, two elements, imho, are little short of disastrous. First, and most sadly, perhaps, is that Carole Landis is barely adequate in what is the more important of the two female star roles. Unnatural, stagy -- almost amateurish. (Incidentally, she bears a striking resemblance to Dolores Gray.) Finally, and also sad to say, Hanns Eisler's score, though filled with interesting music, is really not right. (In Jon Halliday's interview with Sirk, Sirk reveals that Eisler was not happy with the score -- and even wanted to re-do it completely, but there was no time.) There's just too much of it, and at times (especially in the scenes at the carousel -- one of which is crucial) rather heavy-handedly makes the wrong points. (To clarify, the carousel is identified with a kind of musical chinoiserie. Fine, a little heavy-handed, but all right. When Vidocq catches up with "the dragon" in a final showdown, it happens on the carousel. What do we hear? "Chinese" music. It doesn't work.) Of course this has been for long one of the Sirk rarities. Pace an earlier commentator, this is by no means Sirk at his low point (I nominate "Slightly French," followed closely by "No Room for the Groom" and "Mystery Submarine"); rather in search of a workable style for America. ("Summer Storm" and "Lured" -- Sirk's other "European" films of the forties -- are both much more successful.)

From the title, I suspect the movie was marketed as a peek at those notoriously naughty French and their customs. After all, the year is 1946 and the coldly restrictive Production Code is in force in Hollywood. So audiences have to find titillation where they can and producers have to work in risqué spots as best they can. Here, the apparently * swim (which really isn't), along with the occasionally revealing and shapely Carol Landis, does provide some visual stimulation. However, it's the script that provides the main innuendo, as other reviewers point out. The trouble is that much of that innuendo is pretty sophisticated and flies by too quickly to be savored. Seems to me, the script may have misjudged the distance between the European movie makers and thrill-seeking American audiences. All in all, I'd be curious to know how the average viewer of the day responded to this exercise in continental style and wit. To me, the movie never really gels. On one dramatic end is Sanders playing it pretty straight, while on the other, is Lockhart clowning it up as a police official, no less. And in between are various shades of seriousness and tongue-in-cheek, such that the movie fails to establish a defining mood. Then too, the severity of the showdown at film's end strikes me as badly out of sync with the lighter parts. Add to that thinly disguised cardboard sets, an unusually dour ingénue (Signe Hasso), and the result is a kind of mish-mash that only occasionally works. Too bad the utterly charming whimsy of the final 30 seconds is not replicated by the feature itself. Still and all, no movie that sticks witty aphorisms onto the sardonic tongue of the incomparable George Sanders can be ignored.

The often-reliable Leonard Maltin says this is a "delightful romance" and that Sanders is "superb." Maltin must have confused this movie with something else. Sanders is snide and droll and superb, as usual, – you can imagine his delivery of the line regarding adultery, "Sometimes the chains of matrimony are so heavy they have to be carried by three," –but dull, wooden and dated describe this movie more accurately. The storyline itself, an autobiography with Sanders as a suave jewel thief, Francois Eugene Vidocq, who becomes chief of police but can hardly resist the lure of fine jewels, is entertaining enough, but it has the same kind of hollow historical Hollywood treatment that marred such period epics as *Marie Antoinette*, and certainly the deplorable *Forever Amber* (which screams for a classy remake). Though, in his defense, Sanders tries mightily to add some depth to his character, it is all for naught. I am an unabashed Douglas Sirk fan, but this is 1946, and it is one of Sirk's earliest American efforts, lacking many of the signature touches that would define his florid, breast-heaving potboilers. Sirk is just getting his feet wet here, and made a number of unmemorable films over the next ten years until he struck gold with *Magnificent Obsession*, and hit his stride, bombarding us with such estrogen-fests as *All That Heaven Allows*, *Written on the Wind*, and *Imitation of Life*. But *Scandal In Paris* is hardly his best work – a relatively low-budget affair with cheesy sets and ineffective costuming.

Positively awful George Sanders vehicle where he goes from being a thief to police czar. While Sanders was an excellent character actor, he was certainly no leading man and this film proves it. It is absolutely beyond stupidity. Gene Lockhart did provide some comic relief until a moment of anger led him to fire his gun with tragedy resulting. Sadly, George Sanders and co-star Carol Landis committed suicide in real life. After making a film as deplorable as this, it is not shocking. The usual appealing Signe Hasso is really nothing here.

I was already a fan of George Sanders - but this film really gives him the witty language that he can spin under his breath better than any actor in movies. The story itself is far more interesting in its twists and turns than expected. Listen carefully - and you hear real style and imagination.