A Scandal in Paris

In nineteenth-century France, a smooth-talking thief breaks out of prison and sets about building himself a new life. He talks his way past women, past officials and finally past the state itself, rising until he ends up running the Paris police. The joke is that once he is in the chair he catches thieves better than anyone, because he knows from the inside how they think. Douglas Sirk, years before the Hollywood melodramas he is remembered for, is making something light and sardonic here. The story goes back to a real man who wrote his own memoirs, Eugène François Vidocq, whose name appears in the founding of the French police force and who stood first on the side of crime and then on the side of order. George Sanders plays it exactly as shameless as it needs to be, and the film enjoys itself without handing out a moral.