Mr. Klein (1975)

Set in 1942 Nazi occupied France, an art dealer (Alain Delon) makes a tidy profit buying up paintings from desperate Jewish clients. But when he is mistaken for a Jewish man with the same name, he finds himself plunged into a Kafkaesque nightmare. Directed by Joseph Losey (THE GO BETWEEN). What should have been a tight and intense thriller of mistaken identity suffers from Losey's flaccid direction. It's a variant of Hitchcock's THE WRONG MAN with a touch of Polanski's THE TENANT but Delon's protagonist is a vile human being so we're not invested in his fate. One waits in vain for him to empathize with the plight of the Jews as the collaborative Vichy government rounds them up and carts them off to concentration camps. But he's an insensitive boor only concerned with proving he is not a Jew. The movie's ending is meant to be ironic but it makes no logical sense unless Delon's character is dumb and foolish. It's not without interest and very well acted, I'll give it that. A missed opportunity. With Jeanne Moreau, Michael Lonsdale, Suzanne Flon, Juliet Berto and Massimo Girotti.