I wanted to but couldn't!

Fresh and Exciting

A film with more than the usual spoiler issues. Talking about it in any detail feels akin to handing you a gift-wrapped present and saying, "I hope you like it -- It's a thriller about a diabolical secret experiment."

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

Out of the thirteen full-length films he completed before his premature death I have now seen ten which is a reasonable sampling to give him a rating. I tend to be more tolerant that French critics because as I've had occasion to note on previous occasions the cinema-goers are, in the main spoiled as they get to see as many French films as they have a mind to whilst we on this side of the Manche have very much to subsist on crumbs from the rich man's table. This is very much an episodic film or a series of vignettes in which the gentleman thief delights in pitting his wits against wealthy art and jewel owners and always coming away with the prize. Above all the film is both elegant and stylish so that even if you can't work up a sweat of the ploy you can bask in the sumptuous settings.

Five years earlier, Jacques Becker had vividly evoked the seamier side of La Belle Époque in his classic 'Casque d'Or' (1952), but 'Les Aventures d'Arsène Lupin' is strictly a box of chocolates by comparison. Had the whole film been up to the standard of the two robbery sequences that bookend it it could have been another winner. Ravishingly produced in Technicolor, it is never more ravishing than when foregrounding the radiant smile of Liselotte Pulver, whose character forever seems on the verge of amounting to more than she ever actually does. Both she and Huguette Hue look most fetching in their figure-hugging ankle length Edwardian dresses; but their scenes lead nowhere, and the film becomes garrulous and uninvolving. Is it just coincidence that this was Becker's only film without his regular editor Marguerite Renoir?

Jacques Becker directed only thirteen features in a movie career that stretched from 1929 until his death in early 1960. All thirteen are well worth seeking out because Becker was a master of style, and this one was no exception. Elegant, stylized, beautifully set and costumed, it makes a most worthy addition to the Lupin gallery, with a superlative sense of period artistry in all departments — and engrossingly fascinating and/or wonderfully charming performances from the whole cast to boot, in particular from the three leads: Robert Lamoureux (Arsene Lupin), Liselotte Pulver (Mina von Kraft), and O.E. Hasse (the Kaiser).

Jacques Becker 's talent was slowly but inexorably declining at the time:the precedent movie "Ali -Baba' was his biggest failure,and only his last movie,"le trou" returned him to former glories.Maurice Leblanc's afficionados will be disappointed:this is an original screenplay,borrowing some elements from the short stories of "Arsène Lupin gentleman cambrioleur" (the lighter aspect of the writer)and incorporating some of "813" (but without the suspense and the diabolic atmosphere of this very long novel in which Lupin is completely defeated).But it's finally unambitious and uninteresting.It avoids the strong anti-German feel which we can find in the books though.Time had passed.Robert Lamoureux is not Arsène Lupin at all;Edouard Molinaro will cast Jean-Claude Brialy as the famous hero with better results in his "Arsène Lupin contre Arsène Lupin" (1962),but nothing extraordinary.We are still waiting for the director who will do Maurice Leblanc justice.