Strange Impersonation (W. Lee Wilder Productions, Reoublic, 1946)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After the Law and Order: Special Victims Unit episode January 23 I looked for something I could watch while waiting for my husband Charles to come home from work, and I found it in one of those annoying YouTube posts from “Mc Cult Hollywood.” It was an unnamed thriller (the reason I find “Mc Cult Hollywood” so annoying is he lops off the opening and closing credits of his movies so you don’t know for sure what they are) which he headlined as “Hillary Brooke Classic Noir Thriller Movie | 1946 | English Cult Movie | English Thriller Movie.” (I suspect the word “English” in his post title is meant to indicate only that the film is in English, not that it originated in the U.K.) Fortunately that gave me enough information to trace the film on imdb.com: Strange Impersonation, made at Republic Studios in 1946, directed by Anthony Mann (a year after he made his early masterpiece The Great Flamarion, one of the best films noir of the original cycle and a largely unsung movie that deserves to be better known) from a story by Anne Wigton and Lewis Herman and a script by Mindret Lord. Though Hillary Brooke is in it, she’s the second lead; the star is Brenda Marshall (a former Warner Bros. contractee whose best-known credit is probably 1940’s The Sea Hawk, in which she took over from Olivia de Havilland in the thankless role of the damsel in distress eventually rescued by Errol Flynn). She plays Dr. Nora Goodrich, a medical research chemist who’s just invented a new anaesthetic. She’s also engaged to fellow researcher Dr. Stephen Lindstrom (William Gargan, considerably heftier than he was in his brief late-1930’s heyday and equipped with a thin moustache that makes him look oddly sinister for a character we’re supposed to like), but she keeps putting him off and delaying their wedding until she finishes her current research.

Hillary Brooke plays her lab assistant, Arline Cole, who secretly has a decidedly unrequited crush on Stephen. Two things happen to derail Nora’s life: her car strikes a pedestrian named Jane Karaski (Ruth Ford), and while she’s uninjured Jane hooks up with a crook named Jeremiah W. Rinse (George Chandler) who tells her she can get $25,000 in damages from Nora; and Nora takes a dose of her new anaesthetic home with her to test on herself. Nora takes the prescribed 10-cc dose but after she’s under, Arline pours 30 cc more of the stuff into Nora’s flask and causes an explosion. Nora survives the house fire that results but her face is badly scarred (as badly as Bud Westmore, head of Republic’s makeup department, could make it on a limited budget, and her costumers help him out by having her wear veils on her face for the next few reels). Jane comes to Nora’s apartment demanding more money, They Both Reach for the Gun (Maurine Dallas Watkins, you have a lot to answer for!), and ultimately Nora kills Jane accidentally and Jane takes a tumble off Nora’s balcony and falls to the street below. Before that Jane had held the gun on Nora and demanded her engagement ring from Stephen as well as her wallet, and when the police find these items on Jane’s corpse they assume Nora was the victim. Nora then decides to assume Jane’s identity – the “strange impersonation” mentioned in the title – and she undergoes plastic surgery, giving her surgeon, Dr. Mansfield (H. B. “Jesus Christ” Warner), pictures of Jane to serve as a guide when he reconstructs her face. While she’s in the hospital recovering from the plastic surgery, Nora sees an article in a chemistry-industry magazine announcing that Dr. Stephen Lindstrom and Arline Cole have just got married and settled in New York City. When Nora reads this she instantly decides to go to New York herself and reclaim her former boyfriend from his new wife. She gets a job as Stephen’s lab assistant and is so good at her work Stephen is reminded of Nora and falls in love with her all over again.

Nora as “Jane” is invited to dinner at Stephen’s and Arline’s home, and explains her in-depth knowledge of Nora’s background by saying the two grew up together in Vermont and went to the same college at the same time. Arline notices the growing affection between Stephen and “Jane” and decides to divorce him, which leads Nora as “Jane” to accept Stephen’s offer to go to France with him and help him set up a lab there. Alas, Jeremiah Rinse turns up again and rats them out to the cops, who show up at the airport and arrest “Jane.” By this time we’re beginning to wonder how the writers are going to write themselves out of this one – especially as we watch an hallucinatory scene in which all the important people in Nora’s life surround her in extreme close-up and denounce her as Jane’s murderer. The one they pick is the oldest chestnut in the book [spoiler alert!]: It was all a dream! At least they were good enough to “plant” this by explaining early on that vivid hallucinations might be a side effect of Nora’s anaesthetic, but still … I wouldn’t exactly call Strange Impersonation a film noir (though it might have qualified if Arline had been a stronger character and more of a femme fatale), but it’s surprisingly well made and quite compelling even though it suffers from the lack of a major-studio cast. Mann’s direction is strong and puts the actors he did have through their paces well. One imdb.com reviewer listed this as Mann’s third film noir, after The Great Flamarion (which he or she admits he hasn’t seen; whoever you are, you’ve missed a truly great movie!) and Two O’Clock Courage (which is more of a 1930’s-style comedy-mystery than a noir), and closed their review with words with which I’d agree: “That the film succeeds as much as it does in spite of the meager cast, inexistent production values and cop-out finale is a tribute to the mastery of a filmmaker who is just finding a firm footing in a genre he will be making his own in the following year or two.” When Strange Impersonation started I briefly wondered if it would be a version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde with a woman protagonist(s), and that might have been a better movie than the one that got made, but the one that got made is quite good. And also this was yet another historical movie showing people puffing away on cigarettes in doctors’ offices, hospital corridors and patients’ rooms – a far cry from the modern reality, in which smoking in any of these places is strictly verboten!