This is a superb amnesia thriller directed by Jack Conway (1887-1952, no relation to actor Tom Conway whose real name was not Conway), which he made towards the end of his career. He was famous for so many noted earlier films, A TALE OF TWO CITIES (1935), A YANK AT OXFORD (1938), RED-HEADED WOMAN (1932), LIBELED LADY (1936), and so on. In this excellent film we have superb interplay between the lead actors William Powell and Hedy Lamarr. Conway had worked with Powell before. Powell was able to transfer his delightful and insouciant on screen relationship which he had had with Myrna Loy in the six 'Thin Man' films and several other screen pairings with her to Hedy Lamarr in this one, with the greatest of ease. This shows pretty clearly that it was Powell's wit and personality which were the ultimate origin of his magnificent on screen charm with women. (My brief acquaintance with Loy when I was young had already convinced me that the sparkle did not originate with her, and that her part in it was reactive, just as Lamarr's is here. However, both Loy and Lamarr, who in real life was something of a genius who invented a naval torpedo, were highly intelligent women who were able to decode and return the Powellian signals and amplify them for the camera. Above all, Powell needed intelligence and wit in the women with whom he interacted for his magic formula to work.) This film has a superb script, although I would say that the intensity and the mystery sag towards the end because too much is revealed before the finish by letting us see the villains plotting, at which point the mystery leaks out of the balloon to a large extent. It would have been better to keep all the revelations to the very end and to have constructed a more dramatic finale which would have released all of the suspense at the last moment. However, the plot is not a simple one. William Powell plays a French diplomat in Paris who cannot remember anything about his life before July 27, 1922, the day of the Marseilles to Paris train crash in which many people were killed, and when he suffered severe brain damage. After the crash, he was identified by someone, so that he knows his name, but nothing else. He and Lamarr have a happy marriage and his career is thriving. But suddenly he receives a strange letter from a stranger demanding one million francs, which he says he is owed. The man is arrested for extortion but in his defence at his trial accuses Powell of being someone else and living under a false identity. The man says Powell is called Jean Pelletier, but Powell has never heard this name. A complex blackmail plot evolves, whereby Powell himself becomes convinced of his identity as Jean Pelletier, especially when he meets his own 'mother'. Meanwhile, Hedy Lamarr is getting more and more up tight, because of these events, and wondering whether she really knows her husband at all. Everything is greatly complicated by the sudden appearance at the trial of Basil Rathbone, who testifies that Powell is not Jean Pelletier, but then afterwards approaches him wanting a million francs for his silence, saying that he lied in court and that Powell really is Jean Pelletier. Pelletier, by the way, was a bank robber and a murderer, so not the sort of person one wants as an alter ego, or even as an ego. Thrown into the mix is the sultry and slinky Claire Trevor, always a favourite femme fatale. She says she and Powell were once in love, when he was Jean Pelletier, and she has a photo of them together to prove it, which she wears in a locket round her neck. Powell looks insufficiently interested in Trevor, considering how intriguing she is, not to mention attractive. But then he has Hedy Lamarr, so there is presumably no contest. It is an excellent yarn, and although it does not keep you biting your nails until the very end, at least it does so until near the end, and even then things remain ambiguous. So there is plenty of wondering to do, and those are the best kind of films.
Review of Crossroads
