The Man Who Watched Trains Go By

CinemaSerf

Claude Rains ("Mr. Popinga") discovers that his boss (Herbert Lom) has been fiddling the books, and so bankrupting his company - so he can abscond to Paris with his fancy woman. When he catches his employer in the act of burning his ledgers, the two have a contretemps near a canal that has tragic results. Instead of Lom, it is Rains who heads to Paris where he meets the aforementioned lady (the glamorous, but wooden, Märta Torén), and her rather unpleasant friends - including the real love of her life "Louis" (Ferdy Mayne) - who want the money he brought with him from Holland, and which he has rather prudently hidden. All of this has not gone unnoticed by "Lucas" (Marius Goring) who was already investigating some curious currency transactions before alighting on Lom's company, and now on his suspected former chief clerk. It is quite an nice film to look at - Paris in the early 1950s was an attractive city which this photography shows off well, but the plot takes far too long to get going and though Rains is on good form as the mild mannered man whose attitudes are changed by necessity (and who finds that he has quite a taste for a life that lots of money can buy) really quite well, he receives little by way of support from anyone else - except, perhaps, Goring and the pace is just slow with no real conclusion...