This wildly entertaining mashup of then-current events, true crime, bald-faced fabrication, and Grand Guignol excess could only have come from the Hollywood dream factory during the laissez faire years before the censorious Production Code was put into effect. RKO Radio Pictures purchased an option on a series of crime chronicles about famous French police cases (many of them featuring forensics pioneer Alphonse Bertillon, inventor of the mug shot), published in American Weekly Magazine under the byline of H. Ashton Wolfe. A purported investigator for the Lyons police department, Wolfe was in reality a con artist, whose scam fell apart while RKO lawyers were still vetting the material, resulting in a last minute change from police procedural to pulp fiction bordering on Gothic horror. Frank Morgan stars as Sûreté inspector St. Cyr, charged with locating a beautiful Paris flower seller (Gwili Andre) whose Russian heritage has inspired madman Gregory Ratoff to pass her off as "the last of the Romanovs" in a bid to grab a fortune secured in trust for the lost Anastasia in a London bank. Directed with an eye for the grotesque by A. Edward Sutherland (also responsible for the surpassingly unpleasant Murders in the Zoo that same year), Secrets of the French Police was written by future Hollywood Ten scribe Samuel Oritz, who used H. Ashton Wolfe's discredited memoirs as a springboard for his own published novel The Lost Empress, and Robert Tasker, who shared a writing credit as well on that year's equally ghoulish Doctor X (1932).

By Richard Harland Smith