It’s hard to tell whether this film is taking its ludicrous concept seriously or if it is failing to tell it with the right amount of humor. When you have a premise that involves hypnosis, missing memories, and a femme fatale pulling the strings in the background while trying to come across as benevolent, it needs a little bit of tongue-in-cheek to help it all go down. Instead, it plays like a bad episode of a soap opera minus the campiness associated with that genre. Even the title would seem to suggest this is going to be a bit of silly fun, yet it doesn’t deliver on that schlock value at all.
Dr. Mark Steel (Lon Chaney Jr.) is in a loveless marriage. His wife is cheating openly with Robert Duval (David Bruce) but won’t grant Mark a divorce because she enjoys the life of luxury being married to a doctor brings. They fight and she leaves him for a weekend getaway. That night, Mark has a dream that he strangles her to death. While she is away, he also decides to leave. But come Monday he awakes to find he has no memories of the entire weekend and Maria has been murdered. Next to her body is one of his jacket buttons and her face has been disfigured by some acid from his office. While Robert is arrested for the murder, Inspector Gregg (J. Carrol Naish) makes it known that he suspects Mark and begins digging into everything between the unhappy couple. Coming to Mark’s defense is Stella (Patricia Morison), his nurse who has some dark secrets of her own.
Nothing in this film works. Lon Chaney Jr. has struggled much of his career getting out from underneath his typecasting in films like The Wolf Man and he is playing much the same lovable sap here. He’s just sympathetic enough that we don’t dislike him but we also know it would be too neat if it turned out he actually did black out and kill his wife. That just leaves one other possibility, one that is set up in the very first scene. This concept is silly masquerading as serious. Because of this, it is never convincing nor is it entertaining. Instead, it is nothing more than a curiosity that overstays its welcome well before the obvious resolution comes on screen. 1943 - 63 minutes
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