This little-known Technicolour 1952 drama has the perennial supporting actor Claude Rains in the lead of a story based on a novel by the creator of Maigret the detective, Georges Simenon.
His female co-star is Marta Toren, the excellent Swedish actress who sadly died a few years after making this.
The film is well above average, not just because of the quality of the people involved - the cast are uniformly convincing and the direction is deft throughout - but because it is not better known. The story is unusual and suspenseful, the dialogue intelligent and natural, and the key plot point - a policeman trying to stop a would-be criminal condemn himself - nicely turned. Anyone who has admired Claude Rains in big name pictures, down the billing, will see confirmation of his great abilities as a character actor in this performance, given in the latter years of his fine career.
The film is also known as The Paris Express and was directed by Harold French. It's based on one of Simenon’s greatest romans durs. It’s an incredible novel and contains one of Simenon’s favorite themes--a bourgeois mild-mannered protagonist who through some fluke, some twist of fate, derails from his respectable life. Once cast adrift from respectability and the treadmill of duty, responsibility and employment, Simenon’s characters typically escape into an entirely new life, usually in the grimy underbelly of the crime world. For these characters, criminality becomes a liberating event as they shed old habits and routines.
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