Mister Flow (1936)
Directed by Robert Siodmak

Film Review

In the six years he was in France before his departure for America at the end of the 1930s, the German-born film director Robert Siodmak lent his talents to around a dozen films that pretty well encompassed all popular genres, from musical comedy to melodrama and crime-thriller.  Mister Flow, made at the halfway point in Siodmak's fruitful Parisian sojourn, is a curious hybrid piece that vaguely resembles an American screwball comedy of the early 1930s whilst presaging the gloomier noir offerings of the director's subsequent years in Hollywood.  Anyone familiar with Siodmak's grimly atmospheric American thrillers - The Spiral Staircase (1945), The Killers (1946), The Dark Mirror (1946), Cry of the City (1948) -  cannot help but be surprised by the exuberant sense of fun that carries Mister Flow along on its ditsy and implausible narrative course.  Here Siodmak shows his lighter side, aided and abetted by three of the decade's French acting legends:  Edwige Feuillère, Louis Jouvet and Fernand Gravey.

Mister Flow is adapted from one of Gaston Leroux's lesser known novels, first published (a decade previously) in serial form in the newspaper Le Journal, under the title La Véritable histoire du célèbre Mister Flow.  The adaptation was undertaken by Henri Jeanson, who also scripted Siodmak's subsequent Le Chemin de Rio (1937), although he is best remembered today for the poetic realist films of the era that he worked on, Julien Duvivier's Pépé le Moko (1937) and Marcel Carné's Hôtel du Nord (1938).   Great dialogist though he was, Jeanson was never at his best with comedy and his strained humour (heavy handed, predictable, at times bordering on the infantile) is one of the main reasons why Mister Flow fails to come anywhere near to being a comedy classic, or indeed a classic of any kind.

Siomak makes a reasonable fist at juggling the contrasting comedic and dramatic elements of this quirky Jekyll-and-Hyde film, although he is clearly more interested in atmospherics than narrative, happily playing with lighting and camera angles in a way that clearly anticipates the full-bodied noir masterpieces he would go on to make in the following decade.  The stylishly realised courtroom scene at the end of the film is a case in point - this deserves to be in a more sober film and the inclusion of humour in such a scene feels almost indecent.  Left to his own devices Siodmak would doubtless have made this a straight thriller, akin to his later (and far superior) Pièges (1939), but any ambitions in this vein are mercilessly thwarted by his principal cast, who leave no doubt as to the film's real identity - a lively farce of the kind that was popular in France of the mid-1930s.  The film's 'double visage' mirrors the shifting character of the eponymous Mister Flow, a non-too subtle rip-off of Maurice Leblanc's fictional thief Arsène Lupin, here portrayed with exquisite charm (and a pleasing note of mischief) by the great Louis Jouvet.

Jouvet appears in only a few scenes (mostly at the top and tail of the film), but it his dignified, slightly incongruous presence that redeems an otherwise silly entry in the comédie-policière line.  There's plenty of fun to be had in the sparkling rapport between Fernand Gravey and Edwige Feuillère (an inspired pairing that could easily have given Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn a good run for their money) - Gravey is as smooth as ever he was (and funny with it) and what red-blooded mortal could resist Feuillère, the most sensual and alluring of French film divas?  Yet, entertaining as the erotically charged Gravey-Feuillère double act is, it is only when Jouvet comes into shot that Mister Flow rises above the merely mundane and hints at the better film it might have been with a more coherent script and more consistent direction.  It's an odd muddle of a film, but an enjoyable one for all that.

Film Synopsis

It is with great reluctance that Antonin Rose, a struggling young barrister in Paris, agrees to take on the case of Achille Durin, a valet accused of stealing a tie-pin from his employer, Lord Scarlett.  The impecunious lawyer is duped into purloining a suitcase that will prove Durin's innocence, but in doing so he falls foul of a ruse concocted by the world-renowned burglar Mister Flow!  By the time Antonin realises that Durin and Flow are one in the same man, he is in the arch-criminal's power and easy prey for Flow's even more devious partner-in-crime, the delectable socialite Lady Helena Scarlett.  During her stay at the casino resort of Deauville, the latter succeeds in making the naive lawyer a willing accomplice in her nefarious exploits, with the result that Antonin soon risks being mistaken for Mister Flow...