Claude Rains is reliably good as a meek Dutch office clerk who, due to an unintentional crime of passion, winds up in Paris on the run from the law with a suitcase full of money. The rest of the film, however, is a thrown-together mess that seems to rely on Otto Heller’s evocative on-location Technicolor cinematography to provide most of the intrigue. It’s a disembowelment of the witty novel by Georges Simenon. The book is a darkly humorous take on a delusional case who deserts his family to embark on the world’s lamest life of crime while he fancies himself as a devious genius. This film version loses ALL of the meat of the original story and keeps the fat. It’s never funny and never suspenseful. It bends Simenon’s story so that it fits neatly within movie formula lines and then kills it in the process. This is one rough-looking corpse.
Aside from Rains, this is probably most notable as providing an early film appearance from Anouk Aimée in a small supporting role.