Of his early career, Mann said in a 1967 interview, "My first films were shot under conditions that I'd rather not talk about. After all, what do you want, with a budget of 50 or 60 thousand dollars, actors who can't be made to say lines, and non-existent sets?" What Mann found he could do, when presented with a mediocre script such as Strange Impersonation, was to find moments he could milk directorially, using lighting, editing, and composition to visually express what was happening thematically or emotionally in the story.
Those moments are what remain most interesting in viewing the film today. A noirish Republic Pictures programmer, Strange Impersonation takes awhile to get going - too long, actually, for a 68-minute film - and the overall story never really leaves the realm of the silly. Scientist Brenda Marshall tests a new anesthetic in a dangerous home experiment, and her assistant Hillary Brooke sees an opportunity to sabotage the test so that she can have fellow scientist William Gargan to herself. Marshall ends up facially disfigured and manages to swap identities with another woman, thanks to a twist of fate and some nifty plastic surgery (though to us it looks simply like a new hairdo and different makeup), and she returns to get her revenge on Brooke and win back her man.
It's hard to see why these women would fight over William Gargan. His scientist character is weak and bland, and emanates the sex appeal of a stapler. Perennial supporting player Hillary Brooke is the real star here. While she had parts in top-notch movies like Ministry of Fear (1944), The Enchanted Cottage (1945) and The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), certain film buffs remember Brooke most fondly for her appearances in Sherlock Holmes Faces Death (1943) and The Woman in Green (1945), in which she played the title villainess role opposite Basil Rathbone's Sherlock Holmes. Her character in Strange Impersonation is of that ilk, and she does a fine job indeed.
Brenda Marshall (aka Mrs. William Holden) is OK, but in some sequences Mann doesn't restrain her enough and she tends toward the shrill. In his brief scenes, H.B. Warner leaves an impression as the plastic surgeon who sees through Marshall's scheme and warns her, after completing her surgery, "You cannot escape the person you are." (He is nice enough to offer her a cigarette, however!) A few months after this movie's release, Warner could be seen playing Mr. Gower in It's a Wonderful Life (1946).
Mann is at his best here in scenes like the first reveal of Marshall's scarred face, using lighting to express the shock of it. There are also snappy plastic surgery montages and, most impressively, a police interrogation that is especially well composed and shot. An expressionistic montage in this sequence seems like almost a dry run for the opening of Mann's Reign of Terror (1949)! While these stylish sequences merely pop up occasionally in an otherwise ordinary picture, they do show quite clearly what a talented craftsman can do.
Kino's DVD of Strange Impersonation looks fairly good except for a few shots for which there must not have been any decent available film elements. It is now available as part of a boxset from Kino entitled Film Noir: Five Classics From the Studio Vaults. The other titles are The Hitch-Hiker (1953), Scarlet Street (1945) (in a hi-def digital transfer from the preserved negative), Contraband (1940) (the second collaboration between Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger), and They Made Me a Fugitive (1947), a British suspenser.
All have been previously released by Kino as stand-alone editions, but those editions are very expensive. Bundled together here at a very reasonable price, this offbeat boxset is simply a must-own for fans of classic cinema, who will no doubt be happy to forgive Kino the fact that Contraband, fine film that it is, is simply not a "film noir."
For more information about Strange Impersonation, visit Kino International. To order Strange Impersonation, go to TCM Shopping.
by Jeremy Arnold
