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Monday, December 28, 2020

THE MAN WHO WATCHED TRAINS GO BY / THE PARIS EXPRESS (1952)

Loyal, incorruptible head clerk Claude Rains watches in horror as company boss Herbert Lom burns 18 years of account books to hide his embezzling ways.  Seems the patronizing Mr. Lom has been using his Holland company assets to support a secret life in Paris, bankrupting not only the firm, but all the savings Rains has been dutifully tucking away for his wife and children.  The shock is enough to drive a man to madness . . . or murder.  An all too likely outcome doggedly observed by sympathetic Inspector Marius Goring, in from France to close the case against Lom only to find himself tracking Rains, on the lam in Paris after possibly murdering his boss and definitely stealing what’s left of the company cash reserves.  Unusual for a film this size in 1952, it’s a splendidly TechniColored production, well handled by writer/director Harold French* with sophisticated cinematography from Otto Heller.  It also does a better job than most Georges Simenon adaptations in balancing a modest story against sharp etched characterizations.  And it’s got a cast to make things hum with Märta Torén as the Parisian temptress and (briefly) Anouk Aimée as a tart shocked to find she’s only being used for directions.  The film is a small thing, but smart and rather elegantly put together.   And if Rains isn’t quite able to pull off the physicality needed for some ‘second-story’ action or as a lethal threat with a knife, he more than makes up for it in calibrating degrees of incipient madness as he sinks into a moral morass.

DOUBLE-BILL: A recent series of tv films with Rowan Atkinson as Simenon’s famous Inspector Maigret really come off.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *Blacklisted at the time, writer Paul Jarrico worked on the script without credit.

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