Lesser known thriller from the 1960s despite a quality cast and being directed by J Lee Thompson during his peak. It wasn't very successful and one can understand why.
The central conceit of the story is high, high camp - Return to Eden territory: a woman believed to be dead (Ingrid Thulin) comes back to find her husband (Max Schell) has hooked up with her step daughter (Sam Eggar); she has plastic surgery and is spotted by her husband who asks her to impersonate his dead wife in order to access some money.
Now that is an inherently silly story but there have been sillier ones, you just need to commit. But the treatment here has flaws - Thulin doesn't seem to have any motive, it's Schell driving the action. (in Eden Rebecca Gibney wanted revenge.) Then having set up this conceit the film doesn't do anything with it - you don't say have a rival who wants the money or crims after Schell or something for stakes... Thulin reveals her true identity to Schell... and then wants him back anyway. Then the movie becomes about Eggar being jealous over Schell and Thulin.
Stakes are lessened by having Thulin know Schell is a bit of a louse from the get-go so there's no shock of betrayal. Also, we don't really see much of a relationship between Thulin and Eggar back in the old days so Eggar's betrayal seems nothing. Also it's not that much of a betrayal because everyone thought Thulin was dead.
Here is a bigger problem, the reason I think this film didn't do well - actually there's two reasons. First, the cast were probably too foreign. Thulin and Schell have accents, as does Herbert Lom (a doctor) - it probably felt like a foreign movie. I know the characters are foreigners - maybe I'm wrong I just feel it would've done better commercially if they'd been English/American actors.
The second problem is that the background is the Holocaust during World War Two - Thulin is a Jew, taken off to the camps. She's so traumatised that in the opening scene she just sits there in a train as a kid opens a door and steps out to his death - a shocking opening, and kind of pointless for the rest of the story. It really starts things on a downer. It would've been a lot more fun without the Holocast - if Schell and Eggar had teamed up to kill Thulin or something.
I like that Schell was interested in chess but it felt the movie was too interested in making him sympathetic. I mean, he's really not that bad in movie morality terms - he's upfront about being shonky, only decides to kill his wife at the end. He's not a Nazi. It would've been more fun if he'd been worse and there had been no Holocaust in this.
There are echoes of Les Diabolique - the villain thinks he's gotten away with it and a cop pops up at the end; a murder in a bath.
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