The Paris Express

Another movie I watched off my DVR is The Man Who Watched Trains Go By, which is available on DVD, albeit under its American release title, The Paris Express.

Claude Rains stars as Kees Popinga, chief clear at an old Dutch trading firm run by the de Koster family; Herbert Lom plays current boss Julius de Koster Jr. Kees is a man of routine, always paying attention to the trains and knowing from what time a train crosses his path which train it is. It's not as if he has much else to make his life exciting. The one thing he'd like would be to have enough money to take one of those trains wherever it's going.

Of course, that only means that his life is about to become exciting and involve those trains. On this particular day, a Parisian police detective Lucas (Marius Goring) visits the firm and asks to see the firm's books. Apparently a bunch of Dutch currency has been showing up in Paris and not through the normal channels. Governments always liked their capital controls because they want as much power as they can arrogate unto themselves, but that's not the point of the movie. Supposedly the money has been traced back to the de Koster comapny's home town of Groningen, which is why Lucas has shown up.

That evening, on the way to meet de Koster and Lucas at the chess club, Kees sees his boss kissing a strange foreign woman. And then at the club, Lucas shows the two men a photo of that woman and asks if they've ever seen her before. Julius says no, so Kees knows something serious is up. Indeed, when Kees decides to go back to the firm that night, he finds that Julius is burning the books! Apparently that woman is his mistress, and Julius has been embezzling money to give to her. Julius claims he's going to commit suicide, but Kees finds that Julius has a lot of Dutch currency in his suitcase, so Kees knows that Julius is really going to flee. A scuffle ensues, and Julius falls into a canal, hitting his head and dying. Now it's Kees who has to flee.

Understandably, Kees goes to Paris to find that woman, named Michèle (Märta Torén). Although she was Julius' lover, she's got another man in Paris, and that man expects a cut of the money that Michèle was going to get from Julius. That man understands once Kees shows up that he must have the money, but Michèle was at first too stupid to realize this. And that boyfriend wants the money. Meanwhile, Lucas is still investigating....

The Man Who Watched Trains Go By is one of those movies that was made in Britain on a relatively lower budget, but with a star who had Hollywood cachet, in order that they'd be able to distribute the movie in the US more easily. It's not a bad movie, although to be honest I wouldn't consider it much more than a pleasing time-passer. Claude Rains did a lot of stuff in his career that was much better, and this movie depends a whole lot on coincidences for it to work well. One nice thing is the Technicolor photography of Paris as it was in the early 1950s, at least in some of the establishing shots.

The version TCM showed might have been missing a minute or two. There was one scene where there was a bit of a jump that seemed like it might have been several seconds, and the movie ran 79 or 80 minutes, while IMDb claims it's an 82-minute film. I don't think that jump was a problem with my DVR, since the recording did seem to be the full 105-minute time slot that TCM scheduled it in.