Secrets of the French Police

I didn't mean to blog about another Gregory Ratoff movie today after having mentioned one of his appearances yesterday, but it turned out that Secrets of the French Police was next up among the movies I recently watched.

The star here, if you will, is actually Gwili Andre, one of those Europeans (Danish, in her case) who was brought over in the early sound era to be a studio's new exotic star, although in her case it didn't quite work out. She plays Eugenie, a flower-seller in Paris, although we only see her after an introductory scene. A French policeman has been killed, but his funeral is secret because of the work he was doing investigating an organization of some sort.

Investigating this murder is François St. Cyr (a surprising Frank Morgan), and suspicion is going to fall on Hans Moloff (Gregory Ratoff), but more on him in a bit. Leon Renault (John Warburton) is a pickpocket who is in love with Eugenie, although her father doesn't like the idea because, well, who would want their daughter to marry a criminal. Of course, Dad isn't actually her real dad but her adoptive father, as Eugenie was a war orphan from Russia in the previous war.

This brings her under Moloff's eye. He's decided he's going to scam the remains of the Romanov family out of the wealth that they had been able to get out of Russia before the Bolshevik revolution. So Moloff kidnaps Eugenie and hypnotizes her into believing she's the Grand Duchess Anastasia. The police can't investigate openly, so St. Cyr asks Leon if Leon would be willing to break into Moloff's house in order to find out what's going on; apparently Leon is as good a cat burglar as he is a pickpocket.

Secrets of the French Police is an odd little movie, because there's a lot going on here in a very short (58 minutes) movie, so a lot is left either relatively unresolved or unsatisfactorily resolved. The movie isn't helped by the fact that Andre wasn't much of an actress, although in her defense she spends most of the movie in a Trilby-like trance.

But there's also a lot interesting in the movie, with the mansion sets and Frank Morgan not playing rascally but straight. And the story apart from the stereotyped hypnosis angle certainly has some fun aspects to it. Just don't expect anything particularly great.

Warner Home Video released this one to DVD as part of the Forbidden Hollywood collection, on Vol. 10. By this time, they were running out of famous pre-Codes to pacakage together, as you can see by the titles in this volume.