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The brooding Jean Boucheron (Anton Walbrook), also known as “The Rat,” is clearly more than a notorious thief of the Parisian underworld, but is he a conniving homme fatale, a hero with a heart of gold, or both? In Jack Raymond’s The Rat, based on the successful stage play, Boucheron’s puzzling personality finds two female objects: socialite Zella de Chaumont (Ruth Chatterton), whose diamonds lure the Rat into a love affair, and his humble ward Odile Verdier (Rene Ray), whose deceased father he promised to protect her from the neighborhood’s pimps and madams. Abusive one moment, kindhearted the next, the Rat’s impossible to pin down until a murder that links all three characters forces him to take a stand. Raymond creates a wonderfully gritty Montmartre setting (note the Rat’s pigsty apartment) which casts shadows in all the right corners, but this is effectively contrasted with Zella’s sparkling penthouse and the landmark sites of Paris. Chatterton is wonderful as the fearless widow, searching for excitement and titillated by the Rat’s barbarism (“Who’s the man who was winning?” she asks her companion after enthusiastically witnessing the Rat’s victory in a knife fight).
