Run a Crooked Mile (1969) 96m TV-movie
Posted by Solomon on 8/17/2020, 6:11 am
Someone made my copy from channel 9 in Los Angeles by blipping out interruptions. It's in average shape. There's a 93-minute version on YouTube. Below appear minor SPOILERS.
It's a good movie, but not a 10/10 as many reviewers make it. The one critic review has messed up the plot description. Avoid that. As for neo-noir, the most important part is that Jourdan has amnesia and thinks he's involved in a murder mystery. There is a conspiracy against him that he must escape. Along the way he finds himself in a different identity married to Mary Tyler Moore.
The movie might be regarded as an improvisation on John Payne in "The Crooked Way" "A World War II veteran, suffering from amnesia but otherwise healthy, is released from a veteran's hospital, decides to return to Los Angeles to see if he can regain his identity." This is one way it maintains a noir lineage. This movie is much more gentlemanly than the 1949 movie.
Louis Jourdan is first-rate in this. He usually is, and for some reason his polish made me think of Cary Grant. Although the role here is not quite as comic as Grant often is in his movies of this type, Jourdan maintains a puzzled air before becoming more serious. Jourdan plays a math teacher at an English school. Consequently he's very logical in his thinking, and the screenplay serves all of us quite well in that department as he tries to unravel his position. He asks a lot of pertinent questions when he begins to come out out of his amnesia due to a fall from a horse and a second bump on the head. I say "quite well" because it does not go into how he was made to assume a different identity for 2 years, after he received a blow on the head by the conspirators who didn't want him interfering in their profitable game. Nonetheless, this plot device surfaces again in "Shutter Island", and probably some other amnesia movies in which there is more than loss of memory, where the person actually lives as another person altogether. In "Shutter Island" the people in control have ways to hypnotize DeCaprio basically and shift him into a different identity. This genesis issue is all left out of the Jourdan movie and has to be assumed somehow to have been brought about. The screenplay finesses it at the end...However, there is a point at which Jourdan has to dissemble and make believe that he is the new person. We are sort of in "North by Northwest" territory a bit.
The picture moves along nicely with suspense and mystery. There were decent TV-movies back in the age when scripts didn't automatically rely on cursing, drugs, gunshots, blood, beatings, torture, revenge, and sex. The bad guys here are well-dressed captains of business who have a bloc to manipulate gold prices, and that's only a spring to wind up the plot. But it was not long in the 70s before all of this appeared and made a movie like this look like a quaint oddity.
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