As part of my Gregory Peck retrospective, I watched over the weekend this 1965 film where he plays a man who seems to have suddenly lost his memory of the recent past. His attempts to find the traumatic event that caused the loss and recover the events of the lost period result in the people trying to help him out ending up dead.
It is an engrossing film, full of flashbacks and Peck’s character tries to think his way out of his mental fog, that I enjoyed and I was surprised that I had not heard about it before, given the quality of the cast that had Walter Matthau, George Kennedy, and Diana Baker. Matthau as always turns in a quality performance with his trademark hangdog demeanor and droll delivery.
This film is in the mystery thriller genre and as is often the case with such films, the plot has some implausibilities. These have to be expected but what annoys me is when the filmmakers gratuitously add things that make no sense and are totally unnecessary to even advance the story but seemingly are there just to provide some extra elements of surprise. This film had a few of those but the film was taut and suspenseful enough without these additions and would have been better without them.
The credits for the music in this 1965 film were prominently given to Quincy Jones, showing that he has been at the top of his career for a long time.
Is that the one that features several dream sequences that were clearly heavily influenced by Salvador Dali? If so, I remember seeing it, but I had forgotten the name.
brucegee,
You are thinking of Spellbound, which was an Alfred Hitchcock film.
A film to avoid if you are a dog lover; Dry Summer, Turkish, 1963. I woke up last night at 4:30 am, and clicked on TCM to see what was on. Unfortunately, I caught the scene in which a dog is shot and shown to die in agony. I can’t remember being more outraged at a dramatic film. And this film won a shitload of awards. Fuck.
I remember this movie. Not in full detail, but there are moments, such as the 2 fridge scenes -- where the protagonist is first surprised to see his fridge completely empty, later inviting someone else to look, saying it represented his life -- and the other character responds ‘quite a full life’ -- because the fridge appeared to be normally stocked up.