Christopher Isherwood, one of the leading authors and Marxist-influenced critics of the 1930s, served as primary scriptwriter of a film that he viewed as Marxist allegory. The character of the paranoid, clinically homicidal Robert Montgomery symbolizes the deformity that a capitalist system inflicts upon human potential. Just as the greed-driven lust for wealth deprives human beings of the capacity to love, enforcing a view of all human beings as rivals in a self-obsessed quest for wealth, Montgomery's character is a study in the congenital madness that perverts human potential into pathological narcissism (a condition that inevitably affects the falsely "populist" leaders of a society).
The movie would have worked if the roles of the two leads had been switched. Sanders has the dominating physical presence to be spoiled child-man one instant, aristocratic but generous and dignified boss the next--in other words, Sanders would have been totally convincing in the role that, for whatever reason, was beyond Robert Montgomery.
As for Montgomery, he was sufficiently good-looking to play the wronged victim who is exonerated and rewarded with the previously misplaced love of Ingrid Bergman.
The movie would have worked if the roles of the two leads had been switched. Sanders has the dominating physical presence to be spoiled child-man one instant, aristocratic but generous and dignified boss the next--in other words, Sanders would have been totally convincing in the role that, for whatever reason, was beyond Robert Montgomery.
As for Montgomery, he was sufficiently good-looking to play the wronged victim who is exonerated and rewarded with the previously misplaced love of Ingrid Bergman.