Movie Nation

If a mere Madeleine could send Proust “In Search of Lost Time,” surely a bon bon of a movie can inspire a reverie of films and times past, trips taken and those that lie on every traveler’s elusive “Bucket List.”

“The Man in the Hat” is a gloriously simple unalloyed delight. Put an actor in a tiny, vintage car, plop him in the South of France, surround him with quirky recurring characters and stunning spring scenery, and take away his gift of dialogue.

Let the sight gags and oddball set-ups commence.

The great Irish actor Ciarán Hinds, who first gained notice on this continent in “Circle of Friends” and “Persuasion,” a star of “Road to Perdition” and more lately of “Red Sparrow,” the Harry Potter movies and “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy,” would seem an unlikely candidate to try his hand at material more suited to Mr. Bean. But here he is, vamping a little Jacques Tati, lightly mugging and reacting in a film that can only be summed up as “Monsieur Hinds’ Holiday.”

He has a couple of lines — sentence fragments. But that’s it.

He’s just a traveler in the the small towns of the South of France (mostly Saint-André-de-Majencoules and Le Vigan and environs), a silent man who samples the cuisine and motors between auberges (inns), cafes, food trucks and pubs in a 1960s sun-roofed Fiat 500.

He wears a plain blue shirt and jeans, which match the Fiat. And he wears a hat. So that’s what he’s attired in when he finishes off his anchovies, asparagus and wine at a picture postcard harborside Cafe in the opening scene.

That’s where he spies five mugs piling out of ancient Citroën  2CV — an unlikely sight to start with — pulling out what looks like a body and dropping it into the bay.

They spy him, too. As he makes his getaway, little can they know that he will spend the movie eluding this clown car and its inhabitants all through France.

Every town is prettier and more quaint than the last, every narrow back road half as scenic as the next.

But that’s the way things work in this world. He’s forever stumbling into such locales, into two government employees (Amit Shah, Zoé Bruneau) in yellow traffic vests simply measuring things, into the striking woman (Maïwenn, of the horror classic “High Tension”) on a bicycle in a red dress, the very essence of “France” every time we see her.

There’s a chef (Muna Otaru of the brilliant but little-seen “The Keeping Room”). And then there’s the helpful, downcast and equally silent bearded stranger, played by the sturdy British character actor Stephen Dillane (“Game of Thrones,””Darkest Hour,” “The Greatest Game Ever Played”).

The bearded stranger helps The Man retrieve his hat, which he’s dropped into a river under a tiny, Romanesque bridge.

That’s the level of “action” this charming film serves up — a lost hat, stepping in dog doo and losing a shoe, an attempt to return a forgotten purse to the woman on the bike (she keeps running into him, and wanting nothing to do with him), a Fiat surrounded by Alpine goats on the edge of the Pyrenees, car trouble as he makes the Fiat climb those mountains, a shared meal with two screwball brothers whose cuisine and home brew make The Man wince.

The Man overhears conversations, a woman gossiping with a girlfriend about cheating on her man, an innkeeper telling her tale of lost love to a visitor who’s attempted suicide in her establishment.

The Man in the Hat keeps the framed photo of a woman in the car, even as he offers the occasional lift to strangers.

Every so often, he stumbles back into the Bearded Man and The Chef. He’s stopped by the measuring team. And he’s got to escape another “trap” when he runs into those five thugs in the 2CV.

There’s not a lot to this, but what’s here can feel like carefully curated comic perfection. Hinds is downright adorable as the lead, taking us on the dream French vacation foreigners hope for. Even car trouble drops him into a garage run by women who sing “The Song of Forgotten Cars” (car models make up the lyrics, in French) and “The Song of Forgotten Cigarettes” as they work.

“Gitane...Looooooky STRIKE!”

A tenor breaks into a romantic Italian lament at dinner, joined by a guitarist — a female vocal trio joins the Man in the Hat in the Fiat for an acapella dream sequence.

I don’t want to oversell a film so slight in its charms, one that relies on the most basic of sight gags. But something about “The Man in the Hat” and its timing, at the tail end of a travel-banned pandemic, makes this petite picture a postcard-shot delight.

The co-directors are a fellow (John-Paul Davidson) known for filming British celebrity travelogues with Stephen Fry and Michael Palin, and a composer (Stephen Warbeck), which explains the film’s musical quality, and its buy-this-soundtrack score of ballads, classics and pop.

I’m already pining for a sequel. Round up everybody, put Monsieur Hinds in a Triumph Vitesse, and follow him through his native Ireland. What say, kids?

MPA Rating: unrated, threat of violence

Cast: Ciarán Hinds Stephen Dillane, Maïwenn, Muna Otaru, Brigitte Roüan, Amit Shah, Zoé Bruneau

Credits: Scripted and directed by John-Paul Davidson, Stephen Warbeck. A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 1:35

“Iceman” is an attempt to create a back story for the frozen, mummified caveman found in the Ötztal Alps, on the Italian-Austrian border, in 1991.

He was nicknamed “Ötzi the Iceman” by researchers, and was found with a full complement of kit — all the gear one needed to survive as a Neolithic European — furs and flints, bow and a copper axe blade. He was 45 when he died.

We know what he ate for his last meals — Ibex and chamois, grains and beans.

What we don’t know is who killed him.  An arrowhead was embedded in his shoulder and he bled out in the alpine cold.

Felix Randau’s version of how he met that end is mostly plausible, and movie-genre conventional. “Ötzi,” named Kelab (Jürgen Vogel ) here, was a hunter from a mountainside hamlet who came off to see that barbarians have slaughtered his family and everyone he knows, and torched the place.

The raiding party (André Hennicke, Axel Stein et al) hear his howls of grief, but don’t go back to kill him, too.

This feels odd, as their raid left pelts and livestock, and seemed mostly aimed at rape, murder and destruction. There is one object they got their hands on, which when it is revealed, later, is the second instance worth a “Come on, that’s preposterous.”

Kelab — no, we don’t actually hear his name and everybody here speaks an untranslated Rhaetic dialect, remnants of which survived into later history — finds the baby that his little boy was able to spirit from their lodge before the boy caught an arrow himself. Kelab grabs a goat, and with mewling infant in hand, sets out to stalk the murderers and have his revenge.

There are encounters on his quest, his first tastes of revenge. A little convenient “let’s hand the child off so I can continue my hunt” business aids the relentless pursuit.

I like the untranslated period-correct dialect choice by writer-director Felix Randau (“Northern Star”). But while there’s lots of stunning scenery, there’s too little detail added to the life science has reconstructed out of the forensic evidence.

We see a little hunting, a little eating. Still, you’ll be relieved to know that sex hadn’t yet gone out of fashion.

But much of what happens from the pitiless and under-motivated murder-raid onward is too conventional to be of much interest.

Think of the “characters” that developed in “Quest for Fire,” the far more tactile sense of that world, the far more interesting encounters and struggles of the principals. Granted, the phrase “story arc” hadn’t been invented, but come on.

For a moment — and just a moment — I thought maybe there’ll be something truly clever done with all this. If we’re making a point about the eternal violence of man with this story, maybe it’ll turn out that the guy stuffed into a museum in the Italian Tyrol is...the bad guy!

Think of it. We’ve followed this victim’s quest, seen him dispatch murderers and get distracted by others via tracking that is taken for granted, not even implied much less displayed. And then he kills the last guy and…it’s ÖTZI!

Yes, the first critic was Neolithic, and she also declared “This is how I would have done it!”

Still, that struck as a more interesting way to go than the drab Barbarian pre-Conan saga we’re treated to here.

MPA Rating: unrated, graphic violence, sex

Cast: Jürgen Vogel, André Hennicke, Susanne Wuest, Sabin Tambrea, Axel Stein and Violetta Schurawlow

Credits: Scripted and directed by Felix Randau. A Film Movement release on Tubi, Amazon and other streaming platforms.

Running time: 1:36

Guy Ritchie’s reunion for a not-quite-humorless/entirely-too-American and violent and “serious” heist picture with Jason Statham didn’t stir the box office much — $8.1 million was all “Wrath of Man” could manage. Decent reviews could have helped, but weren’t allowed to.

Billy Crystal’s sentimental comic-in-winter “Here Today” proved he’s over, and Tiffany Haddish is about 14 minutes into her 15. Well over a thousand streets, well under $1 million at the box office.

Another $3 million went to the anime “Demon Slayer,” another $2.4 or so to “Mortal Kombat” one-mo-time.

With the ongoing pandemic, movies without the fanatical fanbase that horror, comic book franchises or anime mainstays, etc (“Godzilla vs. Kong”) remain a very hard sell.

I don’t know what Sony could have done with Crystal’s comedy. His “crowd” has aged out of the habit and won’t be dragged into theaters for anything less than the comic second coming, which “Here Today” most definitely is not. Can’t have cost much, low risk and all, and I still wouldn’t have written him a check. Not for starring, co-writing and directing. Nobody to rein in that ego? Sure, NOBODY saw this coming.

Miramax releasing the MGM co-production “Wrath of Man” and imposing an after-the-last-minute embargo on reviews seems a dated, arrogant and in this case, wildly misguided effort to hide a movie that didn’t need hiding.

Welcome back to the game, Miramax. Embargoes are for losers. Not a great picture, not that bad, either. You had a winner, and labeled it a loser. Live and learn.

Elon and Miley and…Chad.

“High Ground” is a violent, vengeance-driven Western set at the end of the Frontier era in northern Australia. More intimate than epic, but gorgeous, stately and tense, it captures a last burst of tit-for-tat reprisals in a country starting to face its genocidal past and racist present.

This can’t-do things-that-way-any-more epiphany only comes as the country slides into the Great Depression and an uprising starts in remote Arnhem Land, one sparked by a massacre a dozen years before. Yes, this was going on as recently as that.

The film takes great pains to show Aboriginal life and the point of view of the continent’s native people as it tells its story from the point of view of a survivor of that massacre, a little boy (Guruwuk Mununggurr) whose life is shattered in mere moments when virtually his entire family/clan is wiped out.

Simon Baker plays a World War I sharpshooter turned law enforcement officer. In any potential confrontation, Travis always seeks the high ground, a vantage point where his accuracy can end a fight in a hurry. That’s where he is when a posse closes in on an Edenic watering hole in some of the most stunning Australian scenery ever put on film.

Little Gutjuk is too young to have absorbed all of the wilderness skills and folkways of his family. As the police-led posse shows up to question the family about stolen cattle, the kid picks the worst possible moment to panic over a snake. In a flash, the slaughter begins and ends.

Travis, appalled, sees all this play out through the scope of his Mauser. When he finally climbs down into it, he stops the murdering of witnesses with his gun and without hesitation.

And he’s the one who takes Gutjuk to the nearby Alligator River mission, where he leaves him with the pastor’s sister (Caren Pistorius of “Unhinged”) and the Aboriginal congregation there.

The bad blood between Travis and his colleague, formerly his wartime spotter/partner Eddy (Callan Mulvey) will fester for years, even if there are no legal consequences for this latest slaughter of the disenfranchised natives.

When an uncle starts an uprising, burning settlement “stations” and killing a white woman, adult Gutjuk, renamed Tommy (Jacob Junior Nayinggul) is ordered to lead police to his uncle (Sean Mungunggurr) to “bring him in” by Royal commissioner (Jack Thompson) in charge.

Tommy wants to know if Travis is there to “kill my uncle,” and Travis wants to know if this is yet another “punitive expedition” against the Aborigines. He’s the only white man in all of this who wonders “Why? There’s always a why?”

Uncle Baywarra is getting revenge for that massacre a dozen years earlier.

“High Ground” is the second feature and second film with an Aboriginal story (“Yolngu Boy”) of director Stephen Johnson, who works mostly in Australian TV. Much of the tale unfolds through the lens of a rifle scope, as Travis — a second father figure for Gutjuk — teaches him how to shoot, and to seek “the high ground,” where he can dictate the terms of a confrontation.

Johnson takes pains to show the unspoiled beauty of a land visited by all this violence, and screenwriter Chris Anastassiades (who wrote “Yolngu Boy”) has the testy, racist Eddy state the obvious about the root cause of this conflict.

“Two people can’t share a country.”

We’re shown the debates and rationalizations of the natives, speaking Jawoyn (with English subtitles) as some seek revenge and others look for a parlay, a negotiated way out.

Johnson’s devotion to shots of birds — in flocks and solo, screeching their various calls — suggests a nod to their symbolism in Aboriginal culture that won’t be obvious to most viewers.

Character motivations aren’t the clearest, and loyalties can seem to turn on a half penny. But the stand-offs are suspenseful, brutal and skillfully staged.

And the performances — from Baker’s resigned stoicism and Mulvey’s hotheadedness to Thompson’s cynical pragmatism — are first-rate, with newcomer Nayinggul holding his own with the veteran cast.

It’s not “The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith,” but Johnson has crafted a striking look at Aboriginal life tucked into a most engrossing tale of racism that manifests itself in violence, violence which has consequences whose blowback can comes years and years later.

MPA rating: unrated, bloody violence, nudity, profanity

Cast: Simon Baker, Jacob Junior Nayinggul, Callan Mulvey, Sean Mununggurr, Caren
Pistorius, Witiyana Marika and Jack Thompson

Credits Stephen Johnson, script by Chris Anastassiades. A Samuel Goldwyn release.

Running time: 1:44

It’s been a very long time since I’ve seen Preston Sturges’ masterpiece, “Sullivan’s Travels.” Watching it again on Mother’s Day weekend (my mother had never seen it) reminded me of the fickle nature of memory, when it comes to movies.

That image of Joel McCrae watching a cartoon with his fellow inmates is what sticks with you from this film. Playing a filmmaker who has to be busted and dumped onto a chain gang before he figures out that his “light entertainments” are what the public craves — and not movies of Big Social Import because life’s hard enough — this is the “money shot,” the image meant to stick with you from the 1941 film.

For the life of me, I couldn’t recall the madcap opening act of the movie, the many abortive starts our self-important star director, John L. Sullivan, has to make before he actually hobos his way out of Hollywood. He’s hellbent on making a picture that matters, one that speaks to the human condition, one he’s titling “O Brother Where Art Thou.”

Nothing is sacred to those Coen Brothers. Nothing.

I didn’t remember the spirited teen in the “whippet tank” hot rod of his own creation outrunning the studio-provided “land yacht” that is to shadow our college-educated, privileged Hollywood icon as he slums on the bum.

“I’m going out on the road to find out what it’s like to be poor and needy and then I’m going to make a picture about it.”

But I vaguely remember the lecture his English butler and valet (Robert Greig, Eric Blore) give Sullivan about his patronizing “caricaturing” of “the poor and needy” and the very idea of faking homelessness, joblessness, hopelessness and abject poverty.

And I had forgotten the situation that allows Sullivan his epiphany, sitting with an audience of “just folks” as they roar with laughter at a Disney cartoon starring Pluto, the dog.

Whatever you take away from the film, the most moving scenes are “Grapes of Wrath” accurate depictions of homelessness and the African-American church the prison inmates are ushered into, the sheet dropping from the rafters as a screen, and a preacher calling for sympathy for “those less fortunate” as they’re led in, in chains, to watch the movie with his congregation.

Jess Lee Brooks was the uncredited actor who gives the film’s lesson in compassion. The fact that Sturges and Paramount left his name off is a stain that should sting, eighty years after it came out. All that attention for 19-year-old newcomer Veronica Lake, and Veronica Lake’s hair, and they leave a good contract player who acts and sings and just breaks your heart, off the credits because of racism.

The nattering studio execs and publicity folk characters don’t really stand out, although William Demarest as a crusty publicity chief, makes an impression.

McCrae, who embodied a lighter version of that innate decency that Gregory Peck projected on and off screen, is terrific. And Lake, unpolished as she is — Bacall was MUCH better and just about as young in her screen debut — manages a winsome way with a line to go with her luminescent shimmer.

“You know, the nice thing about buying food for a man is that you don’t have to listen to his jokes.”

Al Bridge, playing the archetypal chain gang “Mister,” is spitting, whipping perfection.

But Brooks is the one who makes the message work, the one who should have been credited and the supporting player who makes “Sullivan’s Travels” worth the journey. He’s the difference between a good film of the Depression Era, and a classic.

MPA Rating: Approved, violence

Cast: Joel McCrea, Veronica Lake, William Demarest, Jess Lee Brooks, Franklin Pangborn, Porter Hall, Robert Warwick, Eric Blore, Robert Greig and Al Bridge

Credits: Scripted and directed by Preston Sturges. A Paramount release.

Running time: 1:30

John Frankenheimer made his leap from “Golden Age of Television” TV director to big screen Big Name director permanent with “The Young Savages,” a flinty, gritty courtroom drama dressed up as a street gang murder thriller.

He’d just turned 30 when he dove into this Burt Lancaster star vehicle back in 1960-61. And he never looked back, pounding through “All Fall Down,” “Seven Days in May,” “The Manchurian Candidate,” “The Train,” “The Fixer,” “Seconds,” the epic “Grand Prix,” “The Gypsy Moths” and the bomb “The Extraordinary Seaman” before the ’60s ended.

He went on to direct “The French Connection II,” “Black Sunday” and a genuine modern action “classic” — “Ronin” — before he was done.

“Savages,” a non-musical companion piece to “West Side Story,” has Lancaster as a one-time Italian street punk turned assistant DA, grabbing a political hot potato of a case — the broad-daylight/witnesses everywhere killing of a Puerto Rican kid, right in front of his sister on the stoop of his tenement.

ADA Bell has to fight his politically-ambitious boss (Edward Andrews), his “bleeding heart” wife (Dina Merrill), the court-appointed psychiatrist (Milton Selzer) and the rival gangs — the Thunderbirds and the Horsemen — to get at the truth.

His past is thrown in his face in the form of the mother (Shelley Winters) of the youngest of the three accused killers. She’s the fiance he outgrew as he worked and married his way out of the Lower East Side.

The mistrust and New York cynicism comes at Hank Bell from all sides.

The shrink — “I understand they’re building a kid-sized electric chair upstate!”

The wife — “Why don’t you just tell her you’re going to burn her son, for old time’s sake?”

The uncooperative cop (Stanley Holloway, briefly seen and unbilled) on the other end of the radio — “In which order do you want these requests turned down?”

Telly Savalas makes a ferociously dogged New York cop more than a decade before he took up the “Kojak” lollipop, Luis Arroyo becomes a Hispanic gang-banger archetype as Zorro, the smart, smooth and ruthless leader of the Horsemen.

And John Davis Chandler turned his leering, blond and clammy looks to a career of heavies as the ring leader of the Thunderbirds hit squad, striking the victim “in self defense. He had a knife!”

“He must’ve been better with a knife than anybody in the wooooorld,” Bell smiles, in that Lancasterian purr. “Roberto Escalante was BLIND!”

Frankenheimer stages the violence with an in-your-face verve, tilting and turning the camera in fights and foot-chases, hurling us into a brawl on a crowded subway car at one point.

He can’t do but so much with the courtroom portion of this saga, so his solution is to cut that to the bone. It feels truncated and half-abandoned for a reason.

There’s an unfiltered quality to the racial slurs slung about here. In 1961, you could make the case that Italian and even Irish slurs had something near-parity with Hispanic and African-American ones. Not any more.

The story is more melodrama than anything else, with the whole “used to be a couple” business with Winters, the tipsy wife’s liberal politics embarrassing the “job-to-do” ADA and infuriating the man’s all-powerful boss and the many wrinkles in the murder victim and his family’s “complicated” relationship to the gang warfare and vices of the day.

But “Young Savages” is more than just “West Side Story” without the singing. It took another Lancaster movie or two for the rest of Hollywood to catch on, but this kid Frankenheimer? He had style to burn and an eye for big, brawny material that only the big screen could do justice to.

MPA Rating: unrated, violence, smoking, drinking, racial slurs

Cast: Burt Lancaster, Dina Merrill, Telly Savalas, John Davis Chandler, Luis Arroyo, Pilar Seurat, Stanley Kristien, Neil Byrstyn, and Shelley Winters

Credits: Directed by John Frankenheimer, script by Edward Anhalt and J.P. Miller, based on an Evan Hunter novel. A United Artists release.

Running time: 1:43

I interviewed Romero once or twice, interviews that always turned toward why he wasn’t able to get his films financed.

As indie and DIY as the “Night of the Living Dead” icon was, little he managed to get in front of audiences came easily.

“The Amusement Park” was one he got made but couldn’t turn into a release back in the early ’70s. Frankly, the trailer makes it look like distributors would have laughed him out of the room. Even drive-in theaters had some standards, after all.

Still, curious to see it.

Shudder has this, streaming it on June 8.

On a gloomy, fog-enshrouded night a decaying mansion is glimpsed in the darkness. It is where Nurse Cherry’s new assignment is. She will take care of the very old, quite-catatonic master of the house.

Little does she suspect, as servant/chauffeur Dwayne takes her bag out of the ancient British limo, that this place, this job and this “arrangement” is going to bring back the demons of her orphaned childhood along with hints of the dark Halliwell family history haunting these halls.

But we suspect. Because we can’t miss that opening scene where Cherry had “weirdo” scrawled on her forehead by the cruelest orphans there. Because the cadaverous old man (Germán Naranjo) looks like the Living Dead, or the Undead.

Because we’ve seen his imperious daughter (Fiona Horsey) show us the whites of her eyes — and only the whites.

It takes a very VERY long time for anything to “happen” in Colombian writer-director David Bohorquez’s “The Devils Child.” Somebody is yanked out of the frame at roughly the one-hour mark.

Apparently, Bohorquez needed the hour that precedes that almost-scary moment to bore us to death.

Still, it’s an oddly-disorienting horror tale. The accents are distractingly hard to place. Cherry’s is plainly Spanish, Dwayne (Marvens Passioano) is explained away as “island” (Caribbean).

Miss Naomi, the owner’s daughter, has a reasonably-convincing North American accent, as do Cherry’s friends-since-orphanhood. I found myself lost in trying to set this story in some sort of geographic reality — Louisiana without the drawl? That’s a pointless exercise, but the film is so dull that’s where the mind wanders.

Cherry takes the job, accepts the order to keep “the curtains drawn” and the lamps down low in the old man’s room. She explores, and stumbles into visions of children wandering the halls.

She dances with Dwayne and imagines she’s tripping the light fantastic with patriarch Philip in his platinum-blond youth. And she has nightmares. None of which produces anything remotely frightening.

“It’s not real, it’s all in your HEAD” she chants in the manner of 4,321 horror heroines before her.

The accents are worth fixating on because the actors labor through their line readings like they’ve been sentenced to “Hooked on Phonics.” It makes a couple of the players come off as rank amateurs. But if you want your movie, titled “Diavlo” in Colombia, to earn a North American release, this is a price you pay.

Plot elements are introduced — Philip was once “a highly-respected psychic.” — and forgotten. Characters go missing or go mad.

And nothing resolves itself in a way that makes the least bit of sense. Nothing.

MPA Rating: unrated, horror violence, drug use

Cast: Maria Camila Perez, Marvens Passiano, Fiona Horsey, Francisca Tevez and Germán Naranjo.

Scripted and directed by David Bohorquez. A Vertical release.

Running time: 1:28

Here’s an oddity on the resume of the wonderful Hollywood character actor Claude Rains — a Technicolor star vehicle, shot partly on location in Amsterdam and Paris in the early ’50s when Rains was in his 60s.

“The Man Who Watched Trains Go By,” released as “The Paris Express” in the US, was adapted and directed by the esteemed British stage director Harold French, who made 20 or so films, none of them particularly distinguished or highly-regarded today.

The performances are interesting, and it’s especially novel to see the 60something Rains on a bicycle, clambering out of windows and bolting under railcars. Sixty back then was the “new” 75.

The plot is the “quiet little old man falls for a femme fatale and steals” trope of Edward G. Robinson’s “The Woman in the Window” and other pictures of the day. There’s a curiously dated and sentimental sympathy for him that isn’t properly set up, leaving the whole entirely too haphazard to be the compact, dark noirish morality tale it’s meant to be.

Kees Popinga is a conservative, servile man of habits. He’s worked for De Koster & Son, a small firm where he’s chief clerk (bookkeeper) for 18 years. He puts in his days with quiet efficiency, and comes home to his wife, teen daughter, tween son and cigar every night.

He’s fond of the local chess club, even though he’s not very good. And he’s downright meek around his imperious boss (Herbert Lom) and utterly unable to convince the man to take on an old acquaintance whose firm went bankrupt, through no fault of his own.

His firm has “a reputation for honesty and integrity,” de Koster, who inherited the three hundred year old enterprise from his father, huffs. And, as an afterthought, he adds “and morality.”

His clerk “knows more about my firm than I do myself,” but what de Koster doesn’t see is the quiet desperation in Popinga’s thrift and routine. He knows every passing train’s destination, its ETA and whether its late arriving in their small city of Groningen. It’s implied, but only later overtly introduced, that he longs to get on such trains and travel.

The arrival of a Paris detective (Marius Goring) who wants to see their books is the first sign of trouble. Then there’s young woman (Märta Torén) Popinga spies his boss kissing and putting on the Paris train. When he stumbles across de Koster burning ledger books, the game’s up. The fool’s embezzled his company into ruin over the woman and there’s nothing for it but “death before dishonor.”

It’s only when his briefcase pops open that Popinga realizes his employer, who has stolen from him personally (he’s an investor), has looted the safe and is fleeing town, planning on faking his death as he does.

Popinga’s rage means the death by drowning in a canal might not be faked after all. And that briefcase means Popinga can realize his unspoken and barely implied dream and escape his life in Groningen. He’s off to Paris, but is he cunning enough to get away with it?

I can’t speak to the qualities of Georges Simenon’s novel, but the film adaptation has a lot of plot problems that pretty much leap off the screen. The first we learn of Popinga’s discontent is when he shoves his boss into that canal. All that longing to “escape” and “travel” is seriously under-motivated.

Kees Popinga is naive enough to approach a hooker (Anouk Aimée) for help finding a “no passports required” hotel in Paris, and Dutch cheap when it comes to “rewarding” her (indirectly leading to his downfall).

While it’s established that the man is no chess master and can be quite gullible, that doesn’t explain his decision to look up the boss’s mistress when he gets to Paris, to fall into her clutches, hiding out in a dumpy auto repair garage apartment with her sinister “real” boyfriend (Ferdy Mayne).

Rains, so wonderful in chewy supporting roles from “Casablanca” and “Notorious” to “Lawrence of Arabia,” has a bit more trouble hiding his Edwardian theater melodramatic excesses in this performance. Popinga’s character journey seems abrupt and over-the-top, from meek and subservient to wild-eyed with…jealousy, greed, fear of discovery?

And then there’s the kid gloves treatment of the detective, warning and tracking Popinga at the same time, trying to keep him from “crossing a line” we’ve already seen him cross. Or are we supposed to have forgotten that, no matter how much he “has it coming,” Kees killed his boss?

Still, the post-war locations, mixed with British soundstages, are striking and captured in all their glory. And “The Man Who Watched Trains Go By” remains a Technicolor novelty in showing us a favorite supporting player from Hollywood’s Golden Age given a rare leading role, even if he isn’t quite up to carrying the picture with the same panache and cynicism he wore that French policemen’s cap with in “Casablanca.”

MPA Rating: Approved, smoking, violence

Cast: Claude Rains, Märta Torén, Herbert Lom, Marius Goring and Anouk Aimée

Credits: Scripted and directed by Harold French, based on a novel by Georges Simenon. An Eros Films release, streaming on Amazon, Tubi and other platforms.

Running time: 1:22