Strange Impersonation
Directed by Anthony MannNora Goodrich is a research chemist engaged to Dr. Stephen Lindstrom, a man whose wandering attention has already fixed itself on her laboratory assistant, Arline Cole. When an experimental anesthetic is accidentally discharged during a late-night session, Nora is badly disfigured – and begins to suspect the accident was no accident at all. She submits to reconstructive surgery under the care of Dr. Mansfield, an elderly plastic surgeon whose skill offers her not merely a restored face but an unexpected opportunity.
Emerging from surgery with altered features, Nora assumes the identity of a dead woman, Jane Karaski, and begins to reconstruct her life from the outside, watching Arline maneuver toward Stephen and toward Nora's own former position. The deception generates its own momentum: blackmail enters, then the threat of exposure, and eventually murder. Inspector Malloy presses the investigation with methodical persistence while J. W. Rinse, attorney for the plaintiffs, applies legal pressure from another angle, tightening the frame around a woman who has already once remade herself.
Strange Impersonation belongs to the cycle of mid-forties noir that locates its danger not in the underworld but in the professional middle class – laboratories, consulting rooms, legal offices. The film is compact, structured around a conceit that might have remained a programmer's gimmick but instead becomes a vehicle for examining how identity, once shed, cannot be cleanly reclaimed. Anthony Mann directs with the controlled economy he would soon apply to far larger canvases.
