Review of Strange Impersonation (1946) by Sylvester E — 28 Apr 2012

One of Anthony Mann's earlier efforts, and not one of his better known film noirs, this is, if nothing else, a movie that has a good enough sense of humor to bask in its own strangeness. It has a wonderful lead actress in Brenda Marshall, a beautiful screen presence and one who doesn't mind getting a little weird.

The plot involves a twisted love triangle in which a jealous lab assistant gets in the way of a brilliant chemist, Nora Goodrich (Marshall), and her fiance by sabotaging an experiment. When the experiment goes wrong after Nora uses herself as a test subject, she becomes horribly disfigured.

Then she becomes unwillingly involved in a murder, whose victim is mistaken for Nora, she flees to Los Angeles to undergo plastic surgery. With a whole new face, she goes back to try to discover the truth behind her horrible fate.

Yeah, it's a weird story, and it works in spite of itself most of the time. Mann's lively direction is apparent even in this early, crude feature; he lights and frames his subjects wonderfully and spends equal time on their beauty and their ugliness.

It is clear that this is an A-list director who just hasn't gotten the chance to break away from B-movies yet. Most viewers will roll their eyes at the ending of the picture, which looks now contrived and overdone, but I find that it works for the movie in a hokey kind of way.