MAN IN THE DARK (1953)

Edmond O’Brien is serving a ten-year prison sentence for his early B-movies...I mean...armed robbery. He is offered immediate parole if he is willing to undergo experimental brain surgery to remove his criminal impulses. Sounds like the government's liberal pipe dream to abolish jails so we can all live happily together. It will also remove his memory. Not surprisingly, O’Brien impulsively is set on punching somebody in the jaw before surgery but finds serendipity in painting post-surgery. Ballet could not be worked into his rehab schedule. An insurance investigator, needing to recover the stolen money, thinks O’Brien is faking and tracks his every move. Likewise, Ted de Corsia is not buying his former partner's amnesia story. Stereo-typically, under his angled fedora, he is his usual gangster self, grumbling and angrily threatening to beat the truth out of him or burn an eye out with the lit end of a cigar. The latter used as a gruesome 3D stinger.

After twenty minutes, the first of two flashbacks occur as one gang member retells exactly, second by second, word for word, what happened during the robbery. One might accept this if it was O’Brien’s flashback. How he knew about O’Brien’s attempt to make a call from a phone booth after the heist is a mystery. What follows is a pursuit by two officers because O’Brien looks pretty guilty running down the sidewalk. In his early films, O'Brien was quite the runner. Really laying those dress shoes down. His stunt double climbs up a three-story fire escape followed by a silly implausibility: O’Brien drops a potted plant down in the officer’s vicinity in Merry Melodies cartoon fashion. A big clue as to his location. A clichéd chase on rooftops ensues as the frantic music score backs up the action. After a lot of running, O’Brien is not only exhausted but arrested on a painter’s scaffolding.

Audrey Totter is O’Brien’s girl but he does not know it. His recurring dreams, however, suggest she may be more than a stranger. One dream concerns a Santa Monica amusement park with a creepy seven-foot-tall laughing animatronic charwoman that is hard for O'Brien to forget. The following may answer why it is laughing so hard. The most humorous scene, and no doubt a highlight of the 3D processing, has O’Brien getting on The Whip car ride where individual pods rotate around an oval hub. The cars never stay in one position for any length of time, yet five police officers slip into their own car and “chase” O’Brien around the oval, never getting any closer. The officers shoot at him as their pod randomly twirls around. It is lucky a fellow officer was not wounded or a patron failed to dodge the stray bullets. The officer’s training never included this! Understandably, they cannot hit the broadside of a barn. The ride stops and all six orderly get out of their pods. 

O’Brien’s dreams come to life as he and Totter return to the amusement park. He knows where the money is hidden and with a dose of returning greed stuffs the cash inside his suit coat pockets. Perhaps that brain surgery did not work. Her disappointment shows and assumes he has reverted to his old ways. They go their separate ways. Later, the oft-used rear projection roller coaster ride is used with actors pretending their necks are being snapped back and forth. I imagine a real buzz in 3D. O’Brien gets off the coaster as it creeps to the top and climbs down the wooden structure to evade de Corsia, who stands up at the wrong end of the speeding coaster. A goon takes a final bow off the scaffolding after an officer’s bullet rings true. Give the officer a stuffed animal! Never far away, the insurance investigator arrives after bodies stop hitting the pavement and gets back the company’s one hundred thirty grand from O’Brien. The surgery really did work. He and Totter kiss as their roller-coaster relationship levels out.

Note: Directed by Lew Landers and produced by Wallace MacDonald, this was the first Columbia Pictures film released in 3D, all in glorious black and white. It is a remake of the 1936 film, The Man Who Lived Twice, with a premise that has been used over and over since. This seventy-minute B-movie offers up good pacing but the amnesia angle is pretty stale aside from the brain surgery concept. Decidedly more fantastic than John Payne’s war injury in the 1949 film, The Crooked Way.