Here he is the center of attention as blackguard, but one with some depth and some explanation as to his evolution. Sure, he is basically playing Addison DeWitt as far as being the silver tongued devil that is completely selfish and also urbane and witty, but the point is, he doesn't start out that way.
We first see Clementi Suborin (George Sanders) as he is returning home to Czechoslovakia after spending years in a Nazi concentration camp. What does he find? His home is still a police state, it's just the Communists instead of the Nazis, and his brother (played by his actual brother Tom) has used the money entrusted to him to open a shoppe and married the girl Clementi planned to marry. Their justification is that they had heard he died in the camp, but Clementi is wounded to the core. He feels utterly betrayed by those closest to him. This is the reward he gets for standing up to the Nazis - how is never made clear.
So he marches right down to the police station to turn in his brother as having hidden large sums of money in return for papers and passage to the United States. His brother is killed while being arrested, and Clementi gets his passage.
On the deck of the ship as it approaches the U.S., while talking to another passenger, we get some more insight. Clementi says that the devil is his partner from now on, that the devil seems to take care of those in league with him.
Once in New York, Clementi takes a series of lucky breaks and along with some very dirty tricks that could have easily gotten him jailed and some bravado very quickly amasses a fortune in the stock market. When it comes to women Clementi uses them like stairsteps, claiming romance. Sometimes he has two or three that he is working at the same time, barely out of sight of one another. It is like watching a vaudevillian spinning plates on poles.
But Clementi's evil is sprinkled with some remainder of humanity just every now and then. And as you go through the film you learn more about his background. He studied at Oxford - that's why he doesn't seem like one of the Beverly Hillbilies when he gets some real money, because he has been exposed to taste, wealth, and tradition before. His mother always said that he was the dreamer and his brother the smart one.
At any rate, things do not end well for him, since the title itself is the spoiler. This is a good story, supposedly loosely based on the life and death of a real financier, and with a great supporting cast including Yvonne DeCarlo as the woman he lifts out of the gutter and always loves him even though she sees quite clearly his Lethario ways. I'd highly recommend this one.
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