Leon Renault (John Warburton) is a gentleman thief who is in love with a flower vendor named Eugenie Dorain (Gwili Andre). Eugenie is the adopted daughter of Anton Dorain (Christian Rub). Anton is not happy that Eugenie is seeing the debonair thief. One evening Leon and Eugenie are having a drink when she gives him a present, a watch that she purchased for him. Leon wanted to know where she got the money for it. She tells him that a man gave her money for a Gardenia. A few minutes later he gave her a hundred franc note and stared at her for a long time. Leon gets a little jealous but shakes it off. Leon leaves the café. Not long after that Eugenie gets kidnapped off the street.
Later Anton arrives home to find a man in his apartment asking about Eugenie. He tells the man that she is a war orphan from Moscow. He raised her from infancy as if she were his own daughter. He tells the man that he received the child from his friend named Danton before he was killed and that no one else knows where she came from. Anton is then murdered by the man who then tries to frame Leon for the murder.
The man who killed Anton is Han Moloff (Gregory Ratoff). He is also responsible for kidnapping Eugenie. Moloff’s scheme is to pawn the girl off as the missing Princess Anastasia from the Russian Romanoff family and the direct heir to the Romanoff fortune. He brainwashes Eugenie into thinking she is the Princess Anastasia. Moloff then invites the Grand Duke Maxim (Arnold Korff) to France hoping to convince him that she is indeed Anastasia thus ensuring that she is the rightful heir.
Francois St. Cyr (Frank Morgan), of the Surete Nationale, is tasked with finding Eugenie and taking down Moloff. To do that he needs the help of a master thief who can break into Moloff’s guarded estate. Leon is up for the job.
“Secrets of the French Police” was released in 1932 and was directed by A. Edward Sutherland. It is a poverty row pre-code American crime film. It is a weird combination of police procedural with a touch of historical fiction on top of some horror aspects with a Svengali-like villain, not to mention a couple old dark house elements.
There is a lot packed into this less than an hour feature. There are lots of pieces to the film, not just in the mix of genres but also in the characters and how they are connected to each other. It can be a little confusing at times since the pace is faster than the brain is in keeping everything straight. Despite all this, it’s still a rather interesting little piece of film.
Pre-code aspects of the film include Moloff’s nasty habit of embalming beautiful women and encasing them in plaster. When you first see his latest victim, she is naked in Moloff’s bed, and she is already dead which hints at necrophilia. The next time she is being covered with plaster.