Not Guilty

A doctor given to drink causes someone’s death by accident and manages to make it look like an accident. What he expects is remorse, but something quite different happens: for the first time the man begins to feel confidence in himself. With that confidence he sets about correcting what has gone wrong in his life, though how far his idea of correcting will reach is not clear. The film tells the killing not as a detective puzzle but as the story of how a man’s opinion of himself changes. The absence of a sense of guilt becomes the real subject of the film. Michel Simon and Jean Debucourt appear in Henri Decoin’s ninety five minute French film, completed in 1947.