Classic Film Club: The Man Who Watched Trains Go By (1952)

Our next screening is a film adapted from a 1938 George Simenon novel. It was at one point called "a Technicolor novelty" - which, of course, it is for we classic film buffs too! The Man Who Watched Trains Go By was released in the USA as The Paris Express. It stars Claude Rains in a rare lead role, alongside Marius Goring, Märta Torén, Herbert Lom and Anouk Aimée. Kees Popinga (Rains), a fastidious bookkeeper, has worked for De Koster and Son, in Groningen, Holland for almost two decades. He brightens his life by dreaming of where the trains go when they leave his town. That is until, through a chain of circumstances and on a mad impulse, he hops on the Paris Express with a bag full of stolen bank notes, abandoning his wife and two children for a life of adventure.