Frank Vosper sports a moustache like that worn by Emil Jannings in 'The Last Laugh' as a White Russian emigre living in greatly reduced circumstances about to get the boot after eleven years as a night manager in a hotel in this sombre quota quickie by veteran director George Pearson, made in the bad old days that Bernard Miles ironically deplores to Percy Walsh (who plays Vosper's boss) a few years later in the wartime short 'The Dawn Guard'.
Nearly all the sympathetic characters lead lives blighted by lack of money, including Gillian Lind forced to sell herself on the streets, Lewis Shaw whose wife is terminally ill in those far-off pre-NHS days, and a young Geraldine Fitzgerald as a typist forced into the clammy embrace of her predatory boss because she stole the then-astronomical sum of £20.
(Vosper, by the way, had recently played the villain in Hitchcock's original version of 'The Man Who Knew Too Much'. Hitchcock probably lifted the close-up near the end of Vosper's hand holding the gun for 'Spellbound'; or may even have suggested it in the first place!)