Vicky Barton (Jean Simmons) a young Englishwoman and her brother Johnny (David Tomlinson) travel to Paris for the Exhibition. They check into a nice hotel. They speak to the owner and the porter. The porter is miffed because Johnny gives him an English shilling for a tip.

They go to Montmartre for dinner and the Moulin Rouge for entertainment. They keep bumping into another Englishman, George Hathaway (Dirk Bogarde), and his two companions. His companions are staying at the same hotel and later that night he’ll borrow money from George to pay the cabbie.

Everyone goes to bed and when Vicky wakes up the next morning she finds that George is nowhere to be found. Not only that but his room doesn’t seem to exist. His room number, 19, is a bathroom and not a bedroom at all. No one at the motel will ever admit that they ever saw him. She arrived alone they say.

This story is based on an old urban legend. Usually, it involves a mother and daughter, but they’ve changed it to siblings here. It has been adapted into various stories over the years and it was the inspiration for Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes.

In the Hitchcock film, an elderly lady disappears from a train, and someone she only just met has to look for her. In that film the protagonist starts to think she’s gone crazy, that she only imagined the old lady. Which works because she didn’t really know the woman in question.

It seems much more difficult to convince someone that they don’t have a brother. Luckily, the film finds some clever ways to get past that. When she goes to the British consolute he says he believes her but that she’ll have to find evidence. He suggests finding someone else who saw her with her brother.

She remembers that a woman saw them together and that she was going to be at the exhibition. But something quite unusual (which I won’t spoil) happens to her keeping her from testifying.

The police chief likewise says that he believes her and goes to the hotel to question the owner. But again without evidence, there isn’t much he can do.

Enter George Hathaway again. Naturally, he helps the poor girl sort out exactly what has happened. It all leads to a surprising conclusion that is also somehow disappointing. They find a clever way to explain why they not only had to make Johnny disappear but his room too. It also satisfies questions of why they left her alone (except for the gaslighting).

And yet while it is clever, and it does explain everything, I found it not at all satisfying.

The film doesn’t amp up the mystery angle of the story very much. We know exactly who is involved, we just don’t know why. Vicky never seems to be in any real danger either. Instead, it is a story about a woman placed in an incredibly strange situation trying to understand what has happened and why no one will believe her.

On that front, it mostly worked for me. Jean Simmons is quite good and I always love Dirk Bogarde. He’s one of those actors that every time I watch him in a film I want to find him in other things.

In the end, it was a pretty good film, but I still prefer the Hitchcock version of this legend.