'MIRAGE'.....ONCE AGAIN, GREG HELD SPELLBOUND BY A PECK 'O AMNESIA.....

Mirage (1965)  arrived twenty years after Hitchcock's psychiatric romance "Spellbound" but shared a basic similarity in that it plunged an emotionally tortured amnesiac into a tangled murder plot.  And as in the Hitchcock film, that bastion of sturdy normalcy Gregory Peck played the befuddled forgetful guy, his memory temporarily erased by a pivotal trauma.....

         But unlike Hitchcock's dreamy take on this material (with Salvador Dali designed nightmare sequences, lush Miklos Rosza score and Peck's psychosis soothed by a dewy Ingrid Bergman)...."Mirage" has the snap, crackle and pop of an up-to-date, wisecracking thriller you'd expect happening in New York City.......

           Strikingly, director Edward Dmytryk films Peck's flashback attempts to regain his memory as jarring jump cuts in the middle of scenes. It's a brilliant idea and gives the film periodic electric jolts. The score by Quincy Jones, just starting his long distinguished film scoring career, also helps out with sudden, shocking four note blasts of horns to signify Peck's trauma, rage and confusion.

           And screenwriter Peter Stone, working from a Howard Fast novel, pens the second best imitation Hitchcock script ever written.....the first being Stone's script for the Cary Grant/Audrey Hepburn "Charade" and the third one his script for "Arabesque" with Gregory Peck filling in when they couldn't get Cary Grant.  With his scripts filled to the max with witty lines and unforgettable supporting roles, Stone was probably the best Hitchcock-type screenwriter who never actually wrote a script for Hitchcock....

            The supporting cast......priceless. Walter Matthau, already an established veteran scene stealer as the always quipping first-time detective hired by Peck to help unravel Peck's clouded identity, Robert H.Harris, delivering the plot's medical exposition as the irascible shrink whose egotism has shriveled his compassion for Pecks plight, and the ubiquitous Kevin McCarthy playing that up-to-the-minute, quintessential 1960's archetype, the sniveling, glad-handing, spineless corporate minion.

           But where the film truly excels in both its characters and their casting is in its lethal, frighteningly entertaining trio of professional killers hired to harass and stalk Peck...(and frequently shooting at him, which doesn't make too much sense, considering he's carrying in his head a piece of information vital to the story's primary villain.) There's Willard and Lester (George Kennedy and Jack Weston).....Willard's a robotically thuggish hitman, who leaves a trail of collateral damage corpses in his wake while Lester affects a cheerful, jocular persona that serves only as a thin veneer, easily wiped off.  Both of them seem to take great, thin-skinned offence at Peck when he dares to defend himself to stay alive.  The wild card of this trio,and the film's highlight, comes with the introduction of the scrawny, 70-ish Bo (House B.Jameson), an especially nasty little senior citizen who accosts Peck in mid-Manhattan broad daylight......sounding like he's been imported directly from moonshine gun battles in the Ozarks......

           Put Peck and all these characters together in a twisty plot that hinges around a horrifying defenestration (as eye-boggling as any in a Hitchcock film)....and you have one of the mid 1960's best thrillers and one of the BQ's perennial, personal favorites.  Gregory Peck might have his memory problems here, but we will fully remember to give 'Mirage' 5 stars, a FIND OF FINDS.  Don't forget to check it out......