Mirage

 Mirage is a 1965 thriller directed by Edward Dmytryk featuring a sweaty, intense performance by Gregory Peck.  The movie is a combination of The Manchurian Candidate and Christopher Nolan's Memento.  Although it's not a very good film, some elements of the picture seem curiously prophetic; the movie's general tone of ambient paranoia (probably a result of the pervasive fear of nuclear apocalypse and lingering uncertainty about the Kennedy assassination) creates an edgy unpredictable texture, complicating Mirage's mostly impenetrable narrative.  The film has some interesting and effective aspects, but it's marred by a climax that doesn't make any sense.  

In the film's opening sequence (the best thing in Mirage), a Manhattan midtown skyscraper has gone dark.  The power is out and people are groping around in the dark -- literally, since some of the executives are sexually assaulting the staff and a couple of girls invite the dazed and confused hero David Stillwell to an orgy, a "braille session" as they term it, in a windowless conference room.  Stillwell meets a woman who recognizes him, although he doesn't know who she is -- this is Diane Baker (Shela), the movie's love-interest.  With Shela, David descends four subbasements into the depths of the skyscraper.  It's as if he's following Shela into the inferno. (Later, we learn the skyscraper has no subbasements at all -- so what does this descent mean?)  A famous man falls from the top of the skyscraper and explodes like a "dropped watermelon" on the pavement.  When the lights come on, David makes his way to his apartment where he is threatened by a thug with a pistol and told to take a mysterious document to the Barbados.  David knocks out the thug and, then, inexplicably falls asleep.  When he tries to report the encounter to the cops, he can't recall where he was born or his birthdate.  Suffering from amnesia, he flees from police station and visits a psychiatrist, an unpleasant little man who is always washing his hands.  David says that he is suffering from amnesia retrograde for two years.  The shrink is offended at this statement and claiming that amnesia "doesn't work this way", shows David to the door.  By this time, David is being tracked by two assassins, the thug that he beat up in his apartment and George Kennedy wearing lethal-looking steel-rimmed glasses.  David has flashbacks providing clues as to the time that he is missing -- these scenes, featuring a man falling from the top of the skyscraper and two enigmatic figures standing on what seems a golf course, have some of the spooky effect of similar sequences in Hitchcock's Spellbound, scenes in which Gregory Peck tries to reconstruct a childhood trauma on the basis of dream evidence.  Elements of the movie have a slightly surreal disorienting mood, heightened by the hero's encounters with the enigmatic Shela.  (Of course, to solve these riddles, Stillwell would only have to ask Shela about his past -- it's obvious that they were lovers before he lost his memory; but for reasons that make no sense, he either doesn't ask her or she refuses to be forthcoming about her previous experiences with him.)  There are several chases, quite effectively staged, and a climax in the over-decorated office of a villainous ex-military man played by the scowling Leif Erickson (later to be featured in TV's High Chaparral).  The mysteries are all solved:  David's memory returns and the bad guys are vanquished and Shela and David, apparently, live happily ever after.  

(Here are the spoilers:  David's amnesia, that he construes as retrograde for two years, actually blurs his memories for a period of only two days.  David, who thinks he is a cost-accountant, actually is a nuclear chemist.  He's developed a way to remove the lingering radiation effects from the fall-out from a nuclear bomb.  Like poor Dr. Gatling, David thinks that this develop will eliminate war, but, in fact, the military and its malign contractors are enthused about the invention because it will allow them to use tactical nukes with impunity.  David's boss, a famous humanitarian and pacifist, has succumbed to the blandishments of the military-industrial complex and, now, is in cahoots with the generals to snatch the formula for the no-radiation nukes from David.  (He has conveniently scribbled the formula down on a single sheet of paper.)  At the climax of the movie, all the principals are inexplicably gathered in the ornate office of the evil Major.  The major decides to force David to produce the paper on which the formulas are written by making him play Russian roulette.  This is idiotic because, of course, if a bullet destroys David's brain, all will be lost.  Shela, who's in the room for some reason (and also armed), shoots one of the bad guys and there's a scuffle.  Why David wouldn't just buy time by writing out formulae that the bad guys couldn't understand -- that is, faking the formula is completely unexplained.)

There are parts of the movie that I admired, although the film as a whole is badly botched.  Gregory Peck is surprisingly fierce and, even, violent in the picture -- he forces poor Shela to look at the body of a collateral victim whose head has been bashed to pieces in a  bathtub.  This is a disturbing noir-inflected scene in which Peck seems almost hysterical.  The initial scenes in the darkened skyscraper establish an atmosphere of confusion -- we can't exactly see what is happening  and  this correlates well with the fact that David doesn't know who he is or what is going on.  The scenes involving violence are well choreographed and a chase through the city streets ending in Central Park is fairly thrilling.  Walter Matthau, playing an inept private eye, is very funny and has many good lines -- when the men go for a drink to settle their nerves after a violent encounter, Matthau orders a Dr. Pepper and says that he's not exactly "James Bond."  Matthau's private eye doesn't carry a gun and regards firearms as "filthy things" and so he's pretty much helpless in the shootouts in the movie.  (Matthau is supposed to be playing a very young man, but he has one of those hang-dog faces that signify that he was born old.)  A sinister codger who tracks Gregory Peck and speaks with a weird muted southern accent sounds a little like Truman Capote and make an interesting, unusual villain.  The dialogue is very hard-boiled and even epigrammatic but the plot is ridiculous.  As the psychiatrist notes, "amnesia doesn't work like this" and, so, the viewer can't really effectively suspend disbelief at the bizarre events in the film.  The movie is very effectively shot by Joseph McDonald and has an over-active and insistent musical soundtrack, mostly simmering percussive jazz, by the very young Quincy Jones.