The Man in the Road

Following a bizarre encounter in the dead of night on a remote country road, Derek Farr awakens in what appears to be a hospital, without any recollection of his identity, past, location....or even the whereabouts of his moustache! One immediately suspects that behind the ever present, glued on, Colgate smiles of the medical staff something sinister is lurking.

Personal information offered to Farr doesn't ring true and the appearance of a 'plant' with quirky, unrelatable anecdotes leaves him completely mystified. The real mystery, however is how a class act like Ella Raines came to sign up for a project so nominal and utterly faceless as The Man in the Road.

Through a whiskey addled haze, fellow inmate and former doctor, Cyril Cusack slurs a stark warning that Farr might be in imminent danger. Cusack's subsequent disappearance and death serve to endorse his perilous position.

It eventually becomes quite exciting in that; " 'Ello, 'ello, 'ello. What's goin' on 'ere then?" cops and robbersy kind of a way. While crooked Karel Stepanek just drops in for all to see what condition his condition was in.

For personal reasons, Ella Raines quit movies shortly afterwards. It's a pity that a picture so nondescript should have proven to be the final kiss off to a distinguished big screen career, over far too soon. After this outing, she was probably prepared to settle for being the Phantom Lady.

Derek Farr is ambushed on a road,drugged and told by sinister doctor Donald Woolfit that his memory has gone and that he is someone else.Its a dastardly commie plot to take him to Moscow. Ella Raines,in her last film,is parachuted into the plot after 35 minutes.All very routine.

I really enjoyed seeing Ella Raines;(the web 1947, the suspect & la dama desconicida a.k.a phantom lady 1944, The senator was indiscreet 1947 and of course impact 1949) in this British produced film from 1956; in fact she was my favourite American heroine actress.She died aged 68 of a lung type of cancer.This was my first viewing of this film courtesy of Youtube.com.Her personality seemed to be naturally heroic and hence she sparkled in this genre film.Russell Napier appeared in numerous British 'b' films in the 50s & early 60s playing Scotland Yard police inspectors and here makes another appearance as such.The lead actor, Derek Farr I know from "The Dambusters" (1954) Quiet Wedding (1940) & Quiet Weekend (1946).Karel Stepanek played his usual nasty character which was usually a Nazi as in "Sink the Bismark" (1960) or as here a Communist agent.Remember this was filmed before perestroika at the height of the cold war.

Another reviewer made a comparison of the lovely Ella Raines with the equally lovely Gene Tierney with which I concur.I certainly did not find the plot too talky and it had a nice balance between dialogue and action and I awarded it 7/10.

As a mystery thriller the intrigue is not bad but rather fantastic and incredible, a little bit too overdone in complexity to be convincing, but the Russians actually worked along such lines in the cold war, using all kinds of brainwash techniques including hypnosis. It's all about hypnosis here, the victim wakes up without a memory and is more or less coerced into accepting an alien half Russian identity which he is sure isn't his real one, but he can't find his real one, because his brains have been tampered with.

Cyril Cusack makes an important contribution here as another patient, a doctor persuaded to cooperate with the kidnapping league bribed by unlimited access to whisky, which he accepts since he is a failed doctor and an alcoholic, and he works constantly on getting too tipsy to be able to regret it. The scenes with him and with Ella Raines are the best and most interesting in the film, although Donald Wolfit, as always, impresses with his acting, this time as the overbearing professor, who even one of his doctors finally has some objection against.

It's not a great thriller but interesting as an entertainment, and you will remember Cyril Cusack and Ella Raines better than Derek Farr.

An all-star cast (in Britain, at least) does its darndest to keep this talky adaptation of a popular novel afloat. A man awakes to find he cannot remember who he is. He is apparently a patient in a rural nursing home,to boot. Turns out he's a noted scientist the commies have kidnapped and hypnotized, with plans to take him with them to the Soviet Union, where they will pick his science-filled noggin. He befriends a fellow in the home who tells him of the bad guys' nefarious plan, and a little later makes the acquaintance of a pretty American writer who lives in a cottage down the road. Together, they work to unravel the mystery of his identity. Sir Donald Wolfit plays the main villain and Ella Raines is the pretty and resourceful neighbor. These names will mean nothing to most of you, but they were pretty big in their time. In fact, this was Raines' last motion picture. Wolfit, also a noted stage actor, kept working in films for another 10 years, and may be remembered best (probably much to his chagrin) for a nifty little programmer called "Blood of the Vampire," which was made about the same time as this. This modestly budgeted British flick is typically heavy on talk, but there's just enough action and a tiny bit of suspense in the second half to maintain the viewer's attention.