Arsène Lupin (MGM, 1932)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Wednesday, June 12) Turner Classic Movies showed a film that had somehow eluded me all these years: the 1932 Arsène Lupin, starring John Barrymore as the fabled French jewel thief Arsène Lupin and his brother Lionel (in their first film together) as Guerchard, the French police inspector assigned by the Suréte chief (John Miljan) to catch him. Arsène Lupin was the creation of French writer Maurice LeBlanc, who published his first story featuring the character in 1905. The Arsène Lupin Wikipedia page lists his antecedents as Rocambole, a similar gentleman thief created by Pierre Alexis Ponson du Terrail and published between 1857 and 1870; as well as Raffles, the similar character created by E. W. Hornung (brother-in-law of Sherlock Holmes’s creator, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle) in 1889. LeBlanc wrote 17 novels and 39 short stories featuring Lupin, and at one point introduced Sherlock Holmes as a character in Lupin stories joining the search for him – though the threat of litigation from Conan Doyle forced LeBlanc to rename the character “Herlock Sholmès.” The first Arsène Lupin movie was The Gentleman Burglar from 1908, and Wikipedia lists 10 silent films featuring the character, but this 1932 effort from MGM was the first talkie. It was directed by Jack Conway from a committee-written script – Carey Wilson did the basic adaptation and Lenore Coffee and Bayard Veiller supplied the dialogue – based on a Lupin play co-written by LeBlanc and Francis de Croisset. (In the 1970’s LeBlanc’s publishers and his estate would agree to a new set of five Arsène Lupin novels by the team of Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac, best known for writing the source stories for the classic films Diabolique and Vertigo.)

I’d heard good things about this movie over the years, and when my husband Charles and I were starting out our relationship I ran him a videotape of the sequel Arsène Lupin Returns (1938), with Melvyn Douglas as Lupin and Warren William as Guerchard and quite enjoyed it. Jon Douglas Eames in his book The MGM Story rather snippily dismissed the sequel by saying, “It was better with the Barrymores.” I’m not so sure: the 1932 Arsène Lupin is a surprisingly dull film, though with some striking moments. Its plot deals with Guerchard’s attempt to trap Lupin, who is posing as the Duke of Charmerace – after all, no one would suspect a duke of being a common (or even not-so-common) jewel thief! – by sending a young demi-monde woman named Sophie (Karen Morley) to pose as Sonia, a Russian countess and former general’s wife forced to flee when the Revolution deposed the Czar. The idea is that Lupin will seduce her and also try to steal the (fake) jewels with which the French police have supplied her, so they can arrest him. The film contains some surprisingly racy scenes, including one in which Sophie/Sonia gets into the Duke of Charmerace’s bed totally naked as part of her seduction strategy. She demands the return of her evening gown and Lupin threatens to throw it out of his bedroom window. He offers to help her put it on, and she refuses, but they compromise by turning out the bedroom lights so she can re-dress in the dark. I’ve read elsewhere that Jack Conway was a hard-core Christian Scientist and a fierce defender of traditional morality, and MGM used that to assign him potentially racy projects like The Easiest Way (1931) and Red-Headed Woman (1932) out of confidence that his moral rectitude would lead him to tone them down to avoid the censors. Anita Loos, who wrote the script for Red-Headed Woman, said in one of her memoirs that there was one scene for that film which Conway utterly refused to shoot because he found it offensive. He told Loos, “If you want that scene in the movie, you’ll have to come to the set and direct it yourself” – which she did.

Lupin as the Duke is hosting a fancy party at the home of Gaston Gourney-Martin (Tully Marshall, the foot-fetishist Baron Sadoja from Erich von Stroheim’s The Merry Widow), only he’s really after the paintings on Gourney-Martin’s walls and the jewels in his electrically wired safe (which delivers a shock to anyone who tries to open it – unless it’s disarmed first, and Lupin tricks Gourney-Martin into showing him the switch that disarms it). One of the film’s weirder conceits is that Gourney-Martin has such major connections he’s been able to borrow the Mona Lisa from the Louvre to display at his party, and of course Lupin wants to steal it. Eventually Inspector Guerchard corners Lupin at the party, only Lupin refuses to tell Guerchard the whereabouts of the Mona Lisa until Guerchard agrees to release seven of Lupin’s gang members, who showed up at the party dressed in police uniforms. He also tells Guerchard he had Guerchard’s daughter Marie (Mary Jane Irving) kidnapped and his gang will kill her if Guerchard insists on arresting Lupin. Guerchard calls Lupin’s bluff – his daughter has been on the premises, safe, sound and unrestrained, all the time – but the film has a marvelous ending sequence in which Guerchard is riding with Lupin in custody. As they drive across a bridge over the Seine, Guerchard tells the handcuffed Lupin that a previous prisoner of Guerchard’s threw himself over the bridge and escaped, though Guerchard fired five shots at him in a desperate attempt to shoot him dead. Lupin takes the hint and throws himself off the bridge (John Barrymore’s stunt double was a very busy man in this film!), Guerchard fires the obligatory five shots at him and then reports to headquarters that Lupin is dead. Only he isn’t: in the final scene he’s in a jewelry store purchasing a wedding ring for Sophie/Sonia and joking that it’s unusual for him to be buying instead of stealing it.

Aside from containing an annoying, if common, mistake about the Mona Lisa – it’s depicted as being painted on canvas when Leonardo da Vinci really painted it on wood – Arsène Lupin is an engaging film whose droll and clever ending (even though ripped off from MGM’s production of Billy the Kid two years earlier, in which Sheriff Pat Garrett allowed Billy to flee across the border and escape to Mexico, instead of shooting and killing him as actually happened) helps make up for some of the previous longueurs.