Cornell Borchers sneaks from her home to meet John Milton while her husband, Francis Lederer, is conducting a concert. Gustav Fröhlich has no papers. He has been living with friends and driving a cab shift. It's New Year's Eve, so he decides to turn himself in to the police the next morning, spend some time in jail, and get on with his life. He takes one last shift, and his American passenger dies, stabbed to death. He takes the man's passport to a forger and gets his own picture put in, and now he is John Milton, an American citizen.
This remake of 1935's ICH WAR JACK MORTIMER is an engaging thriller, in which we start out knowing all about Fröhlich, but gradually fraulein Borchers' story is revealed, as they race through night time Vienna, a city of a busy downtown and rubble, well photographed by Helmuth Ashley, a Vienna as dark and foreboding as the city in THE THIRD MAN, but without the extreme Dutch angles, the people just as sketchy-looking, the police as terrifying.
