Les mystères de Paris (1962)

During the reign of Louis-Philippe, in Paris around 1842. At the Bal Mabille, a gathering place for the well-to-do bourgeoisie, the dandy Marquis Rodolphe de Sambreuil dances a waltz with his charming mistress, Irène, and suggests they leave the ball for a more intimate evening. But Irène has arranged a private party, with Baron de Lansignac as the guest of honor. Although he can barely stand the man, Rodolphe accepts Lansignac’s wager on a carriage race to his townhouse, pitting their two carriages against each other. The wager is for gold. Rodolphe is on the verge of winning when his carriage strikes the laborer Godin in a narrow street. He stops to help the man, who refuses to be taken to hospital. Unaware of how serious the accident is, Rodolphe gives him his red leather purse as compensation before leaving. When Marie arrives at the scene, she finds that her father has died. During the party, Irène urges Rodolphe to accept Lansignac’s proposal that they go into business together speculating on the stock market. Despite his lavish, flamboyant lifestyle, Sambreuil, a career diplomat, has remained a man of great integrity. He rejects the proposal, considering Lansignac nothing but a shady businessman who unscrupulously speculates on urban planning schemes. At the Cercle Royal, Lansignac is convinced that Sambreuil is the anonymous author of a newspaper article calling him a thief who preys on the poor. Their quarrel is quickly broken up, and Lansignac has to leave the room. From then on, Sambreuil becomes his sworn enemy. Two months later, Marie and her ailing mother live modestly by sewing in a damp apartment. Looking for work, Marie leaves the employment agency in the Saint-Martin–Saint-Denis district and meets a cantankerous old woman who offers her a job as a waitress. In reality, Marie is duped and kidnapped by the vile hag La Chouette, then sold to the owners of a tavern called “Le Caveau des Chevillards.” She is held prisoner, and her captors intend to exploit her youth and beauty by forcing her into prostitution for their employer, a nobleman. Meanwhile, Sambreuil returns from a diplomatic mission in the Balkans, and the persistent Irène again urges him to get back in touch with Lansignac. He flatly refuses. Just then, a police officer arrives to return the red purse bearing Sambreuil’s initials, which was found on Madame Godin, the widow of a man who had been accidentally killed. The marquis refuses to press charges and visits her at the infirmary in Saint-Lazare prison, where she is being held after being unjustly accused of theft. Feeling responsible for Godin’s death, he hears her last wishes and promises to do everything he can to find her daughter Marie, who has mysteriously been missing for two months. After learning, through inquiries made by Jérôme, his diligent butler, in the working-class neighborhoods, that Marie may be another victim of La Chouette, Rodolphe sets out disguised as a porter to explore the capital’s underworld. On the Seine quays in the Saint-Paul district, where he gets hired to carry heavy loads of sand, Rodolphe acts as a champion of the wronged in a spectacular brawl, protecting Fanfan, a teenager, with the help of a porter named Le Chourineur. Together they flee when the police arrive and take Fanfan home to his decent parents, the Morels, at 10 rue du Temple in the Marais, where they meet Pipelet, the friendly, talkative concierge. Having befriended Le Chourineur, a kind-hearted former convict sentenced to penal servitude on the Île de Ré for a deadly brawl, Rodolphe discovers in his company a world unknown to respectable people and scoundrels alike. He is emotionally shaken by the poverty and misery he sees everywhere, which he could never have imagined was so widespread. At Rodolphe’s request, Le Chourineur, who knows where La Chouette can be found, takes him to “Le Caveau des Chevillards.” There, at the risk of his life, Rodolphe—possessed of immense strength and great fighting skill—rescues a young blonde singer from two vile men who are forcing her to drink, and entrusts her to Le Chourineur to take somewhere safe. During the terrible fight, one man against ten, Rodolphe does not realize that a man has recognized him while watching discreetly from a distance. The man has come to collect the young woman reserved for him, Marie, whose beauty has dazzled him, and take her to his hotel in Neuilly: Baron de Lansignac. Still unable to reveal his true identity to Marie, Rodolphe entrusts her to the Pipelet couple, who are delighted to take her in. Back at his hotel, outraged by the misery he has discovered, he is mocked by Irène at the Saint-Vincent-de-Paul gathering; she has not abandoned her plan to form an alliance with Lansignac. In his redemptive quest to reward the good and punish the wicked, Rodolphe has Jérôme distribute gifts generously to the Morel and Pipelet families and to the orphan Marie, to whom Rodolphe feels attracted—and she to him—while passing him off as an eccentric marquis. Worried by Rodolphe’s prolonged absences and driven by ambition and jealousy, Irène breaks with him and, propelled by her excessive greed, joins forces with Baron de Lansignac. Under the pretext of ridding Irène of a rival, the young Marie, Lansignac devises a vile plot against Sambreuil to avenge himself for being publicly exposed as a dishonest speculator who buys up all the homes in the Temple district to demolish them. Irène carelessly lets slip that Rodolphe keeps a file containing diplomatic secrets in his personal safe. A fight to the death begins between the two men: kidnapping, arson, slander and murder do not stop Lansignac, who is in fact one of the leaders of the criminal underworld. He in turn succeeds in having Sambreuil arrested, accused of divulging state secrets to a foreign power and cited as a witness in the murder of Jérôme Foulon, his own butler. But neither Lansignac’s fortune nor his connections on all sides can prevent Rodolphe, after escaping from prison, from standing up to him and foiling his traps and assassination attempts in order to establish a measure of social justice in Paris. Irène, who has finally discovered the wickedness of the sordid Lansignac, comes to retrieve the documents incriminating Rodolphe but, heedlessly forgetting that Lansignac is first and foremost a miserable scoundrel, is killed by him. At the Bal Mabille, Baron de Lansignac, convinced that he has finally got rid of Marquis Rodolphe de Sambreuil, whom he believes drowned in the Seine, tells the gullible Marie that Rodolphe was shot while trying to escape from prison. But to his great astonishment, Sambreuil appears before him carrying a confession written by Irène, which is damning for the baron and proves Sambreuil’s innocence. In one last desperate attempt, Lansignac tries to kill Sambreuil, but he is the one who falls, struck by a fatal bullet fired by Le Chourineur. Marie and Rodolphe are reunited forever, while the dancers at the Bal Mabille launch into a wild farandole.