I was half-way through this neglected Cold War paranoia-mystery-Hitchcocky black-and-white (and noir all over) amnesia movie when I realized that I was watching a lineal ancestor of the Jason Bourne films. It's all there: the trauma, the amnesia, the shadowy organization determined to eliminate the amnesiac, the assassins, the hair-breadth 'scapes, the chases, the murky plotting.
David Stillwell (note the encouraging onomastic pun in his surname) played by the ever-upright Gregory Peck, has accidentally defenestrated his mentor and has gone into what this film calls "unconscious amnesia." He's got to figure it all out, which he does via Bourneian flashbacks, even while being pursued by a bunch of very bad guys, who fortunately, are most amateurish with their pistols.
There's also a dollop of Bond in the mix: a nuclear secret, a threat to world peace and in addition a possibly helpful, possibly dangerous former mistress.
And there's Walter Matthau as a shambling amateurish detective. Early Walter Matthau — taking a few first steps on the road to becoming the real Walter Matthau.
It was a superior movie during the first mysterious hour, but as the mystery unravelled, it turned into cliche and incoherence. Too bad, because the noir atmosphere was splendidly realized and the shots of 1960s Manhattan a genuine treat.
Mirage is a political movie, but it's hard to track its politics. Howard Fast, who wrote the novel from which the screenplay is adapted, leaned far left while the director, Edward Dmytryk, leaned right. The film teeter-totters.
Mirage was remade three years later as Jigsaw, in which an LSD overdose was substituted for amnesia. Jigsaw doesn't seem to be available on Netflix, but I'll look for it. "Unconscious amnesia" apparently mutated, during the hippie years, into "drug amnesia." A new genre
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