A wealthy industrialist, Roger de Vetheuil, married, feels assured of aging in peace. Then appears a blackmailer who accuses him of being a usurper, actually called Jean Pelletier, a mobster well known to police. Vetheuil, judging himself slandered, refuses to listen to his tormentor and goes to the police. The man speaks. The scandal is public soon ...
Acting
Charles Vanel's unraveling from smug bourgeois to shattered man.
Direction
Bernhardt builds dread through silence and glances.
Writing
Tight 69-minute descent with no wasted frame.
Director
Curtis Bernhardt
Charles Vanel
Roger de Vétheuil
Jules Berry
Lucien Sarrow
Suzy Prim
Michèle Allain
Tania Fédor
Anna de Vétheuil
Marcelle Géniat
Mrs. Pelletier
Jean Claudio
Paul de Vétheuil
Pierre Palau
Leduc, first blackmailer
Marcel Melrac
Gendarme
Paul Amiot
President
Eddy Debray
An accused
Jean Tissier
Travel agency employee
Auguste Bovério
Pierre
Marcel Duhamel
Domestic (uncredited)
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
Curtis Bernhardt fled Germany in 1933; this 1938 French film was his last before Hollywood, where he'd direct Bette Davis in 'Possessed.' The exile's eye for fractured identity bleeds into every frame.
The 'usurper who stole a dead man's identity' was a genuine obsession in 1930s European cinema, reflecting interwar anxieties about class mobility and unstable national identities. Roger's crime and cover-up mirror the era's fear that anyone could be someone else entirely.
FR
