Just when I was beginning to think that the Hollywood memory-loss well had run dry, along comes Whirlpool and another variant of the world's most flexible mental affliction. This time: loss of memory by hypnosis.
It could have been a good film: Ben Hecht, Otto Preminger, Gene Tierney, Jose Ferrer. But it's gimmicky and the psychology is vulgar pseudo-Freudianism.
Malignant David Korvo (Ferrer) hypnotizes poor Ann Sutton (Tierney) into imagining that she's committed a murder. Will she recover her memory in time for the true murderer (Korvo himself) to be discovered? Yes, she will. The film turns into something like a police procedural but might better be called a psychoanalytical procedural. Richard Conte plays the Tierney's husband, and he's the psychoanalyst, but frankly he's so surprisingly dense that he's an embarrassment to his entire profession. The audience is led through a series of melodramatic twists and turns, many requiring wholesale suspension of disbelief, before all turns out well, or pretty well, because poor Ann Sutton (Tierney) is reunited to her doltish husband.
Here's a picture of Iago-like hypnotist Jose Ferrer staring into the deer-in-the-headlights eyes of luminous Gene Tierney.
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