Praised for its use of sound and Academy Award-nominated scenic design, the film has been called Clair's "crowning achievement".

Starting as a poor record merchant, Louis is able to work his way up until he is the well-attired and well-mannered head of a business that makes phonographs.

The factory is run with great efficiency and the workers, overseen by a strict foreman, toil on an assembly line in an environment reminiscent of the prison from which Louis escaped.

From his jail cell, he hears music and sees, in an apartment across the street, a woman who appears to be singing while she hangs flowers around a window.

Finding himself below the flower-covered window, Émile pauses to listen to the song, which winds down and stops, revealing to him that it was being played on a phonograph.

She gently extricates herself from his embrace and finds Paul, whose date has abandoned him due to his lack of interest in her.

They chase him to the factory, where he finds Louis, who has locked the group of blackmailers in a vault and is cleaning out his safe before running away.

Louis tells the policemen and security guards he has not seen anyone, but, unfortunately, Émile accidentally frees the blackmailers while he is looking for a hiding place.

He notices a policeman in the audience and announces he has finished his work at the phonograph company and gives his factories to the employees.

When a fancy car drives by, reminding Louis of how he used to live, Émile kicks him in the butt and, happily, they head down the road together.

As Louis bandages the cut, the soundtrack plays the non-musical marching of the prisoners (who wore wooden clogs).

There are several other passages, such as when Louis keys in the numbers to retrieve the profiles of Jeanne and her uncle, where the music supplies the only accompanying sound.

DVD Verdict's Barrie Maxwell adds that the film depicts "a France oblivious to all going on around it, as portrayed by the sequence in which an aging French politician drones on to his audience about justice and liberty and patriotism, while the audience has long since lost interest, preferring instead to concentrate on chasing money that has accidentally fallen out of a bag and is now blowing in the wind.

[4] Mordaunt Hall of The New York Times argued that its humor "is provocative of thought", and praised "the cleverly designed settings for the scenes in both the prison and the factory.

René Clair himself was never a part of the case, and was actually quite embarrassed by it, since he had great admiration for Chaplin, to whom he stated all filmmakers were in debt.

[6] Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote that the film's "proletarian plot (two convicts go free, one becoming a tramp, the other acquiring a phonograph factory) makes it a period piece in the best sense.

"[7] Michael Atkinson considers it to be Clair's "loveliest and most lyrical film", and wrote that the work is "filthy with formal élan, wild sound [...] and choreographed movement, and if anything [it has] gained an antique daydreaminess with the years.