BEFORE: Well, it rained on Friday and Saturday, that's the third weekend in a row that we've had to postpone the work on our roof, but since we expected to be homebound for roof repairs, we didn't schedule any place to go this weekend. So we drove out to Coney Island so we could at least get some sun and some summertime eats at Nathan's. I saw the parachute jump that was featured in Hitchcock's "Mr. & Mrs. Smith", though it's not functioning any more but the iron structure is still standing.
Linking from "Lifeboat", Hume Cronyn was in several films with Norman Lloyd (last seen in "Saboteur"), including "The Green Years" and "The Beginning or the End". Hitchcock's cameo in "Lifeboat" didn't really count, since it was just his picture in a newspaper ad.
THE PLOT: A psychiatrist protects the identity of an amnesia patient accused of murder while attempting to recover his memory.
AFTER: I've got a huge problem with the premise of this film, since the amnesiac in question first appears as the new head of a mental asylum, and then over time it's discovered that he is not who he's pretending to be, or rather that he's not who he believes himself to be. Didn't the asylum conduct interviews when they were hiring a new chief of staff? How can an impostor show up as the new hire, and everyone just takes him at his word that he's the new man in charge? Wouldn't whoever interviewed him for the job realize that THAT's not the guy they hired? Forget that, wouldn't he have to produce some form of I.D. for the W-4 form, or whatever hiring paperwork they had back then?
There's also a lot of stuff here about psychoanalysis, the hidden meaning of dreams, spontaneous amnesia, guilt complexes, etc. But I wish that Hitchcock would have taken the time to learn a bit about how these things work before just shoehorning them all into his murder mystery. What a shame that the human psyche may not work in the ways that make your screenplay possible - no, by all means just go ahead with it and maybe no one will notice. Why couldn't you build your screenplay around the way that human mental illness really works, rather than just assume that it works the way you want it to?
OK, so we don't know exactly how human memory works, or the loss thereof. But I just doubt that seeing a fork make lines on a tablecloth would evoke the hidden memory that you want it to, just because you want it to. It's like that through the whole picture, leads to the man's missing memory are found in the most unlikely of ways - and when that doesn't work, simply saying "well, just TRY to remember..." seems to do the trick. Sure, if he can't remember something, just ask him again more forcefully, that'll get it. Why not just smack him in the head to jar the memory loose?
This film has perhaps the fakest skiing scene ever, even worse than that one James Bond film with Roger Moore replaced by a stuntman. In this case the two lead characters pretend to ski with a rear-projection of a mountain slope behind them, neither one is wearing any cold-weather gear at all, and it's quite clear that a fan is blowing their hair to simulate their movement. They move in completely different ways, but remain a consistent distance from each other, and it's just ridiculous. But it also has dream sequences designed by Salvador Dali, so there's that.
Also starring Ingrid Bergman (last seen in "Cactus Flower"), Gregory Peck (last seen in "To Kill a Mockingbird"), Leo G. Carroll (last seen in "Suspicion"), Michael Chekhov, Bill Goodwin.
RATING: 5 out of 10 opening doors
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