Like all good pictures, it can be looked at in several ways. Given the year of release, one of those ways is as a mood piece, or perhaps a character study of the waterfront bar it is set in. As the day and night go on, the character of the bar shifts, from the patrons nursing their drinks as they play cards, straight out of a Cezanne painting, to a rowdy night time crowd of sailors and prostitutes. It requires a score that is well thought out; alas, whoever did the score on the copy I looked at didn't do the job for me. It was too intrusive, the changes in moods too abrupt, making that point of the film too obvious.
Another of the ways it can be approached refers to its advanced cutting for the year. The cuts are frequent, the changes in viewpoint striking, leading into the conclusion that set design, while important, is not as important as editing; the same set, after all, sustains many moods.
As an example of the vast changes in film technique, this movie is of great interest to me in understanding the evolution of cinema: constantly changing into something else, yet trying to be something fixed at the moment. To a casual movie-goer five years later, its techniques were undoubtedly familiar and even banal: quite properly so. such a person was not concerned with the story of movies, but the story of the movie he was looking at, at that moment. Those sets of techniques and attitudes, grown commonplace and dull, merely show how striking, original and compelling they were such a short time earlier.