Occasionally charming foreign adventure/romance with Glenn Ford as a down-on-his-luck American returning to post-war France to retrieve the title treasure he found during the war and becoming entangled with cops, bad guys, and tour guide Geraldine Brooks. Lovely Brooks has a wonderful girl-next-door quality, but the 50s priggishness makes the romance tiresome at times.
The whole affair has a nice Hitchcockian feel, altho Hitch would never have been so priggish--with either with the sex or the violence. Director Rudolph Mate was the cinematographer for Hitch on Foreign Correspondent and other A-list directors in the 40s but had already directed several films himself by the time he did The Green Glove, including the classic DOA in 1950, with Edmund O'Brien.
Still, something is missing. Ford remains a cipher thruout; we don't get the feel of desperation that Hitch (or his leading men) was so good at conveying. Ford was a battle-hardened lieutenant in the war, yet it doesn't seem to help him much against the bad guys. Brooks is clingy, yet coy. A European dame, sexier and more independent, might have been a more interesting choice. (This is one of those stories where the leads have to pretend to be married at one point, thereby forcing them to be titillatingly intimate, right? Wrong: Mate blows it by having them demand separate rooms anyway!) The climax is good, if a bit predictable. But the exciting mountain chase down a goat trail feels a bit like a setting in search of a story, since we know from the opening scene that the story doesn't end there. Overall, it's a good A-picture adventure that could have benefited from a bit of B-picture sex and violence.
