Strange Impersonation: Anthony Mann

There are only two kind things that I can say about Anthony Mann's Strange Impersonation, a tedious film about a scientist who is horrifically disfigured during a sabotaged experiment and who sets out to get her revenge after receiving a new face via plastic surgery. First, the film does an admirable job hiding its meager budget. Cinematographer Robert Pittack did a fine job photographing the relatively few sets in such a manner that they never become too over-exposed or bland. Second, the film sees Mann begin to come into his own stylistically: moody atmospheres accentuated by hard lighting, skilled camera movements that nevertheless don't draw too much attention to themselves, and a handful of scenes that are stripped of narrative fat and excess such as the interrogation scene finale. A montage of over-exposed faces that falsely accuse a young woman of murder near the end is particularly fascinating. This sequence remains as one of the most grotesquely stylized (in a bizarre, pseudo-German Expressionist sense) of Mann's entire career. In this moment Strange Impersonation almost flirts with the horror genre. But it is to no avail. The film is too contrived, too predictable to hold any interest for viewers uninterested in the development of Mann's early career. Too many scenes are bloated with repetitive, melodramatic dialogue exchanges about love, devotion, and relationships. More than once I found myself yelling at the screen for the characters to get on with it. In a normal length film such passages are troublesome. In a 68 minute feature like Strange Impersonation such inane frivolities are fatal. Here is a film too belabored with melodrama to reach the heights of horror and suspense that it so desperately strove for. It also commits one of the cardinal crimes of narrative storytelling: It Was All Just a Dream...I probably would have been angrier at this twist if I hadn't figured it out literally 10-15 minutes into the film.

4/10