Here is another very different version of the man
on all sides of the law, Vidocq! Much more charming as one might expect with
George Sanders playing the legendary character than was Gérard Depardieu
in Vidocq (2001) but then so would a runaway bull at a children's party.
The interesting thing is that in the illustrations of the real Vidocq, he
looks a bit like Depardieu, stocky and not very handsome. Sanders plays
him suave and elegant - much like The Saint. The structure of this film is
that it comes from the Memoirs of Vidocq, which I believe he did in fact
write but how truthful they were I can't say. But this begins with Vidocq
(Sanders) narrating his own story in a sardonic and slightly smug manner.
He says he was born in a prison to a poor mother who always committed a crime
right before giving birth in order to have the baby delivered at the cost
of the government. And that he never knows who is father is. In fact, Vidocq
was born to a wealthy middle class bourgeoise family and that he returned
to them a few times when he was young and broke.
But this is the Hollywood version so we should expect a few departures from
the truth. And as far as I can tell nearly the entire film is completely
made up except for a few basic facts - he was born, he was a criminal, he
did well with the ladies, he went into the army and he became head of the
police. Everything else is fabricated. But so what. It is not like the audience
back then could have known. They did not have Wikipedia to refer to. After
reading the memoirs of Casanova and learning a few things about seduction
- perhaps I need to read that - he breaks out of jail thanks to a file in
a cake sent by an elderly lady and escapes with his friend played by Akim
Tamiroff. They go off with Napoleon to Europe but the film didn't have the
budget to show that part. He comes back - steals the jewels of a Marquise
(Alma Kruger) - and then pretends to solve their disappearance and returns
them in order to be appointed as the head of the Paris police. Easy as pie.
He also falls in love with the granddaughter of the Marquise. Love turns
him into an honest man but also a rather dull one. She is played by Signe
Hasso from Sweden. Yet another actress from Europe who was promoted as the
next Greta Garbo. She wasn't and has no more presence here than a butterfly
passing by. Carole Landis as a showgirl and Gene Lockhart as a fumbling policeman
are also in the cast.
Perhaps the most interesting thing about this film is the director. This
was only his third film in Hollywood after escaping from Germany and Hitler.
Douglas Sirk aka Hans Detlef Sierck. He had directed about a dozen films
in Europe but was best known for his work in the theater. He heard whispers
that the Gestapo might come for him. He wasn't Jewish but his wife was. He
was to go for four years before he got to direct a film in America. His first
was Hitler's Madman about the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, Nazi SS
commander. I have only seen his classics of the 1950s - the gorgeous indictments
of the American middle class - what he called "dramas of swollen emotions".
None of that glamour and saturated use of color - this is black and white
- is here in this film. While he was a director he didn't have that much
of a reputation while working - that came later thanks to the French who
re-evaluated his films. They called him an auteur but not yet - this is pretty
much a quick knockoff for the producer Arnold Pressburger, another German
in exile from Hitler who had produced the wonderful 1931 film Berlin-Alexanderplatz.
