Crack-Up (RKO, 1946)

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

Last night (Saturday, June 14) I watched another “Noir Alley” showing of a quirky 1946 film from RKO, Crack-Up – not to be confused with a 1936 Crack-Up, an airplane drama with Peter Lorre as a foreign spy trying to steal the plans for a new plane for the proverbial sinister foreign power. This Crack-Up was made 10 years later and stars Pat O’Brien (who for some reason tried to revitalize his career at RKO in noir movies even though in his salad years at Warner Bros. he’d essentially been the good Irish guy to James Cagney’s bad Irish guy in films like Angels with Dirty Faces, in which Cagney played a gangster and O’Brien played a priest!) as, of all things, a curator at a big-city art museum. Crack-Up began as a short novel by crime and science-fiction writer Fredric Brown called Madman’s Holiday, though Brown’s original is almost impossible to find: it was republished only in a limited edition of just 350 copies and the quoted price on Amazon.com is $5,000. O’Brien was trying to restore his standing as a major star through “dark” roles in films like this one, Perilous Holiday (also 1946), and Riffraff (1947). In Perilous Holiday he was a reporter unjustly accused of being part of a counterfeiting ring he’s actually investigating for a story; in Riffraff he’s an unscrupulous private detective and “fixer” in Panama City; and in Crack-Up he’s a museum curator named George Steele, whose irreverent lectures to museum patrons as he leads them through tours have already got him on the outs with the management.

In the opening scene he’s shown literally trying to break into the museum where he works by smashing two windows and hitting a cop who tries to bust him. Steele is finally subdued and the museum’s management talks the cop out of pressing charges, saying they’ll handle the matter internally to avoid giving the museum a bad name. The museum has a large staff consisting of similarly venerable officials, including the museum director, Stevenson (Erskine Sanford); Traybin (Herbert Marshall), who’s on loan to the U.S. museum from the British Museum to investigate suspected art forgeries; Dr. Lowell (Ray Collins, reuniting him and Sanford from the cast of Citizen Kane), a member of the museum’s board as well as an M.D. who takes charge of Steele’s care; and two women, Steele’s girlfriend, magazine writer Terry Cordell (Claire Trevor), and Barton’s secretary Mary (Mary Ware). Steele is convinced he was in a train wreck the night he was caught trying to break into the museum, and we get vivid flashbacks as he’s interrogated by police lieutenant Cochrane (Wallace Ford), the cop who caught him. The flashbacks show Steele on a train after he responds to an emergency call from his family saying that his mother suddenly took ill and is on her deathbed, but Cochrane tells him there’s no record of a train accident in the area and Steele’s mother is just fine, thank you. (There’s a bit of a plot hole in that Steele pays for his train ticket but doesn’t collect it from the station window, and no conductor asks him for it while he’s on the train.) At least part of the MacGuffin involves two paintings, one by Thomas Gainsborough and one, Adoration of the Kings, by Albrecht Dürer, which the museum had been exhibiting on loan from European musea, only the Gainsborough was supposedly lost at sea when the ship taking it from the U.S. back to Britain blew up in an “accident,” but Steele was convinced that the Gainsborough being returned was in fact a copy and the real painting had never left the U.S. He wants to use an X-ray machine to examine the Dürer to see if it, too, is a fake, but Barton won’t buy him the X-ray machine because “we’re a museum, not a hospital.”

In an attempt to see what happened to him on his alleged train ride, Steele takes the same train the next night, asks various people he meets – including the conductor, the ticket agent, and a vendor selling snacks and cigarettes in the cars (the idea that you could still smoke on a train really dates this movie!) – and finally learns that the night before two men escorted a drunk who looked a lot like him off the train. Steele is convinced that he was the mystery “drunk,” and he’d actually been drugged to incapacitate him and discredit anything he might have to say about the fake paintings. (Bits of the “Gainsborough” were recovered from the shipwreck, and the British Museum did tests on them and determined the missing painting had been a fake.) This rather oddball recension of Gaslight with a male as the person being “gaslighted” has to do with a plot by someone connected with the museum to steal the original paintings, substitute copies, and then destroy the copies in fake “accidents” – and the objective behind the assaults on Steele has been to discredit him as an expert and therefore make sure his allegations that the paintings are fakes won’t be believed. For most of the movie I was thinking that Herbert Marshall’s character would turn out to be the villain, especially since he was playing the part with the same smarmy self-righteousness he brought to his actual villain role in Alfred Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent (1941), but the real bad guy turns out to be [spoiler alert!] Dr. Lowell, whose idea is to steal valuable paintings for his own collection and keep them from the rest of the world.

He even has a marvelously classist and elitist speech giving his justification: he says museums open the great works of art to people too stupid to appreciate them properly. Only, unlike most of the movie villains who steal famous works of art and keep them to themselves, he doesn’t have a private room in his home where he keeps them locked up so only he can look at them. Instead he hides them in his home behind a thoroughly mediocre painting, and we don’t learn where they are until the end, when Mary, who was part of his plot, agrees to tell the authorities where the real Gainsborough and Dürer are in exchange for leniency. Crack-Up got mediocre reviews and was a box-office disappointment, largely because critics of the time thought that the plot was too convoluted and hard to follow. Certainly all those old men in charge of the museum got a bit too tiresome, and too hard to tell apart, after a while. One big disappointment was the casting of Claire Trevor in a good-girl role rather than either a femme fatale, as she was in her best film, Murder, My Sweet (1944, and also at RKO), or the part of a gin-soaked former cabaret singer in Key Largo (1948) that won her the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. We watch her through the whole movie waiting for the claws to come out, and they never do. Still, Crack-Up is a compelling thriller despite the convoluted plotting, and it offers Pat O’Brien a quite good showcase as at least a slightly more complicated character than he usually got to play!