ian_ison
Probably symbolising the Wheel of Fortune, a beautiful hand-cranked carousel in a pond features a couple of times towards the end of the film. Look for the rabbit seat which resembles the dog, Dougall, from the British Magic Roundabout stop-motion children's series. Here the church's St George vs Dragon stained glass tableau plays out in real life as the morality play on our freedom to choose right from wrong. Death & the Maiden are here, too, for those with the eyes to see. It seems that the first meeting of St George & his maiden happens at a rural bathing fountain where a serpent has lain hidden in this dress of one of the damsels bathing there. A strike from his riding crop dispatches that incarnation of the Beast but there will always be more. His other lady - seemingly more fair but dark at heart - dies when her jealous spouse disguised as a 'good fortune' manakin-selling beggar mistakes her attentions to a milliner's mannequin & shoots her out of the picture, so to speak. The delicate kiss of benediction which he gives to the girl whilst slipping quietly through her bedroom chamber may translate as a reverse Pygmalion touch where the spirit of St George transfers out of her dreams & into the rogue upon whom the chapel's window is styled.
mukava991
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.
dougdoepke
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 nude 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.
style-2
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.
AD
