AllMovie

Secrets of the French Police was designed by producer David O. Selznick to showcase Gwili Andre, a ravishingly beautiful model from Denmark, whom he hoped would become another Greta Garbo. That, needless to say, didn't happen -- Andre was perhaps the least accomplished of the era's European imports -- but the film ended up belonging squarely to its villain, Gregory Ratoff. A dialect comedian and an accomplished director in his own right, Ratoff tears into his assignment with appropriate gusto. It is a marvelous performance and although Ratoff doesn't rank alongside Bela Lugosi, Boris Karloff, and Lionel Atwill in the bogeyman sweepstakes, Secrets of the French Police would have been poorer without his presence. British actor John Warburton made his American screen debut as the nominal hero (having replaced Rod LaRoque and Nils Asther, both victims of a rampant influenza epidemic), and is a fine, upstanding hero, and Frank Morgan, sans his usual befuddlement, has fun playing it straight for a change. Although clearly a potboiler and despite the miscasting of Miss Andre, Secrets of the French Police deserves to be better known today than it is.