Well, he’d thrown one punch earlier in the movie, but he was definitely pulling out the stops in that fight scene towards the end!
That was seriously interesting because just a couple of years later Aylmer would have been in a film noir for pulling a stunt like the dead man's clothes swap (wanted for your own murder: a classic), but in 1939 the genre hasn't quite crystallized and therefore even as circumstances become complicated, infuriating, frightening, and dumb as an entire bag of rocks (attending your own inquest: not recommended), it stays on the right side of nightmare; there's the doppelgänger thread and some intermittent jags into atmosphere (I was especially fond of the early shot of Aylmer looking through the fourth wall of the fire), but it is basically a crime thriller and it works out fine, even if it ends like so many B-pictures as though the film literally ran out. You did not mention the protagonist's Leslie Howard-grade horn-rims. I guess Robert Newton was not all that often cast in roles where he had to look believably like a dork.
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That was seriously interesting because just a couple of years later Aylmer would have been in a film noir for pulling a stunt like the dead man's clothes swap (wanted for your own murder: a classic), but in 1939 the genre hasn't quite crystallized and therefore even as circumstances become complicated, infuriating, frightening, and dumb as an entire bag of rocks (attending your own inquest: not recommended), it stays on the right side of nightmare; there's the doppelgänger thread and some intermittent jags into atmosphere (I was especially fond of the early shot of Aylmer looking through the fourth wall of the fire), but it is basically a crime thriller and it works out fine, even if it ends like so many B-pictures as though the film literally ran out. You did not mention the protagonist's Leslie Howard-grade horn-rims. I guess Robert Newton was not all that often cast in roles where he had to look believably like a dork.