Strange Illusion (1945)
Directed by Edgar G. Ulmer

Film Review

In the mid-1940s, a sudden surge of interest in Freud's psychoanalytical theories, particularly the meaning of dreams, resulted in a slew of films in which dreams played a central part.  Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbound (1945) was the most prominent of these, but there were many others, mostly B-movies such as Maxwell Shane's Fear in the Night (1947), which made the most of the popular craze whilst it lasted.  Edgar G. Ulmer's Strange Illusion was one of the first films of this ilk, one whose lack of narrative sophistication and even more obvious lack of budget is made up for by the director's penchant for moody atmospherics.  What could so easily have been a pedestrian crime drama inelegantly fashioned after Shakespeare's Hamlet becomes, in Ulmer's deft hands, an eerie study in obsession with an unremitting aura of doom, marred only by some unfortunate casting decisions.

The film begins and ends with possibly the spookiest sequences of Ulmer's entire oeuvre, a fog-wreathed dream in which a stark silhouette inveigles its way menacingly into a bereaved family.  When the mist fades and the dream ends abruptly, we are catapulted back into the land of the living, but the same sense of something rotten persists, growing more intense as the plot develops and builds to its fast and gripping denouement.  Here, Ulmer struggles to make the practically non-existent budget stretch to fill the canvas he has allotted himself and the cost-cutting is more obvious than in his other films because of this.  Unable to hire top league actors, he has to make the best of the second-raters at his disposal; rear projection is used with gay abandon to obviate the need for expensive location shooting; and the cardboard sets look as if they might fall down as soon as anyone sneezed.  Yet, cheap as the film looks, at no point does it appear shoddy or unprofessional.  Ulmer's particular genius was making art out of next to nothing, and whilst Strange Illusion is far from being his best film it's an enjoyable entertainment that can hold its own alongside more pristine noir offerings of this era, even Hitchcock's Freudian digression.

That James Lydon was cast in the lead role probably had more to do with his popularity at the time than to his innate abilities as an actor.  Having started out as a promising adolescent in such films as Robert Stevenson's Tom Brown's School Days (1940), Lydon became famous through the series of Henry Aldrich films in which he starred for Paramount Pictures.  His character in Strange Illusion is Henry Aldrich in all but name, a cartoonish juvenile with a knack of getting himself into trouble.  Lydon comes across more as a colourless brat who is too full of himself than as a sympathetic hero in peril, so we take a relish in his dicing with danger and end up half-hoping that he will make one slip too many and wind up as cat food.

Lydon's singular inability to arouse our sympathies makes it dead easy for Warren William and Charles Arnt to gain our support as the vile nasties who threaten the cocky juvenile and his noisome family.  Warren William's glory years may have been well behind him by this time (he was a big star in the 1930s) but Strange Illusion gives him plenty of scope to chill and thrill us with another of his great villainous portrayals.  It's an odd turn of events that we end up caring more for the villains than the good guys, and you can't help wondering that this was Ulmer's intention, subverting a tedious Nancy Drew style mystery so that the spectator becomes a sadistic voyeur consciously wishing the destruction of a dull-as-ditchwater all-American family.  Were he not constrained by the public sensibilities of the time (to say nothing of the Censor), Ulmer might well have ended the film with William and Arnt gloating in triumph over the broken bodies of Lydon and his dismal entourage - at least that would have been closer in spirit to the play as Shakespeare had written it.  Alas, unlike the famed Danish prince, Henry Aldrich had to live to fight (and bore) another day.

Film Synopsis

College student Paul Cartwright experiences a troubled dream in which he is reminded of the tragic death of his father, a prominent judge who was killed when his car collided with a train.  In the dream, the silhouette of a stranger appears with Paul's mother and sister, seeming to take the place of his dead father.  Fearing that his mother may be in danger, Paul cancels his fishing holiday with his mentor Dr Vincent and returns home, to find that his mother is already being courted by another man, Brett Curtis.  It looks as if Paul's dream is already starting to come true...  Looking through his father's papers, Paul soon has reason to think that Curtis may be a notorious criminal whose wife drowned not long after their marriage.  Apparently concerned by Paul's increasingly neurotic behaviour, Professor Muhlbach, the owner of a nearby sanatorium, advises his mother to have him placed in his care.  Realising that Muhlbach is in cahoots with Curtis, Paul plays along with the professor and enters the sanatorium as a 'guest'.  Now that the troublesome son is in a position where he can easily be got rid of, Curtis and Muhlbach put into action their cruel plan of revenge against Mrs Cartwright...