Ho-hum. Another day, another amnesia movie.
Crack-up offers still another variant on this most malleable of diseases: amnesia that is chemically-induced.
George Steele (played by too-old-for-the-part Pat O'Brien) presents a danger to a doctor-thief played by reliable Ray Collins. To discredit him, Steele is kidnapped and injected with "narcosynthesis" which causes him lose his memory and act erratically. Too many silly plot complications and a couple of murders follow, but eventually a second injection brings Steele round.
I'm not aware of another case of chemically-induced amnesia in film, but I know that there is such a thing in medicine. Propofol and scopolamine are frequently mentioned and I believe that even the common sleeping pill, Ambien, may have amnesiac properties. So there's some limited scientific underpinning for Crack-up's apparently fantastic premise.
In noir, amnesia is as common as the common cold. In the 40s and 50s, a guy couldn't walk down a louche shadowy city street or take a dame out dancing to a night spot without encountering half a dozen cases. It was a regular plague.
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