The film has an unusually fine pedigree. Producer Arnold Pressburger was also responsible for Fritz Lang’s Hangmen Also Die and Sternberg’s Shanghai Gesture. Cinematography was handled by one of Europe’s finest, the exiled Eugene Shuftan, and scored by Hanns Eisler, whose credits include several Fritz Lang films. A brilliantly epigrammatic script is credited to Ellis St. Joseph (with uncredited help from Sirk). The cast is a veritable who’s who of treasured 1940s Hollywood character players: Sirk favorite George Sanders, Akim Tamiroff, Carole Landis, Vladimir Sokoloff, Alma Kruger, Gene Lockhart, Alan Napier.

A Scandal in Paris opens in 1775 in a prison, a suitable launching point for the biography of Eugene Francois Vidocq (Sanders), a thief who eventually reformed to become the city’s chief of police. Vidocq’s inspiration is Casanova, and with his dwarfish cohort Emile (Tamiroff), he steals his female victims’ money, garters, and hearts. With the help of a file hidden in a birthday cake, the two of them escape their latest sojourn in jail to pose for a painter recreating the images of St. George and the Dragon for a church mural, and they then return to their life of crime.

Before this can happen, Vidocq and Emile encounter the Marquise (Alma Kruger), a dotty but sarcastic dowager into whose wealthy family the two insinuate themselves. Vidocq’s brief impersonation of St. George (complete with ridiculous blonde wig) showed his better possibilities, a motif that continues in his encounter with the Marquise’s granddaughter Therese (Hasso), who’s immune to Vidocq’s immorality but not his charms. His cleverness in crime is on full display in these scenes, as he ingeniously arranges to steal the Marquise’s jewels and then "recover" them, resulting in his assumption of the job of chief of police. In the process he ousts the present chief, Richet (Lockhart), who, in the film’s Lubitschian romantic-circle schema, happens to be Loretta’s husband.

Vidocq is one of Sirk’s most complex characters, driven to crime almost as a birthright but at the same time a cynical romantic. If St. George, Therese, and eventually the cuckolded Richet remind him of what he can be, Emile is the worst part of Vidocq’s personality, always there to encourage his immorality. (The film lets Sanders explicitly state this toward the end.)

The comedy of the film ranges from the high- to the lowbrow, from Vidocq’s unerring wit and the constant betrayals and forgiveness, to the antics of "Satan the Monkey" and the Old World low jinks of Emile’s family of comic cutthroats and thieves. Still, there’s also a seriousness to Scandal that gives it an unexpected gravitas. Gene Lockhart’s Richet, for example, is initially ridiculed as a buffoon, but he takes on a tragic pathos when he puts on one of his innumerable disguises – this time a cheap beard and a huge, rickety set of bird cages strapped to his back — in a desperate ploy to catch Loretta with Vidocq. His apotheosis is also Vidocq’s when he begs the latter to find the man who ruined him. Vidocq tells the truth when he says he’s already dispatched him, but Richet doesn’t know Vidocq is describing himself.

One of the film’s most enchanting spaces is a small woodland playground complete with merry-go-round. In this masterful studio confection, Therese reveals that she knows everything about Vidocq, and forgives him. But typical of the film, it’s also the scene of Vidocq’s murderous final encounter with Emile. In both instances, composer Hanns Eisler’s darkly romantic theme sanctifies the space as mysterious, ethereal, and potentially life-changing.

With its Continental collaborators behind and before the camera, a sophisticated "adult" script, and its air of romance with tragic underpinnings, the film joins a small, select group of such works from that time, including Albert Lewin’s Private Affairs of Bel Ami and Edgar G. Ulmer’s The Strange Woman, that benefit from classical narratives – dark fairy tales, really -- helmed by expatriate European directors. What distinguishes A Scandal in Paris is its additional air of evanescence, as if the Old Europe of charming woodland merry-go-rounds and dowagers in castles and romantic criminals was now a fleeting space, evaporating in the face of a spreading American culture. While Sirk made several more independent or low-budget films before moving into the big brassy melodramas for which he’s most famous, this was in a real sense his European swan song, the last time he would interpret his own past in a film.