Street of Chance (1942)

best movie i've ever seen.

Strong acting helps the film overcome an uncertain premise and create characters that hold our attention absolutely.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

This noir whodunnit is manned by Burgess Meredith, who gives a textured performance, and an early career appearance of Claire Trevor, who would go to greater things. Even Sheldon Leonard, as a deadpan cop, is mildly amusing. The amnesia plot, however, wears a bit thin on the nerves, as it so cliched. and was done too often in noir.For a B film, this is not too bad. It keeps your interest for over an hour and is decently paced by the director, Jack Hively. Initially, one thinks the protagonist is the target of gangsters, but we find out quickly it is just trigger-happy cops. There is no explanation, however, as to why Jack transforms into Naehring for a year, and dumps his loving wife for that same year. Despite that hole in the plot, the film is entertaining.

Burgess Meredith makes probably his greatest performance and is completely convincing as the man in the awkward position of having lost all memory of the latest year of his life and finds himself hounded by hoodlums and eventually wanted for murder. Claire Trevor is less convincing as the lady involved, who wants to get away with him and help him abscond whatever it is, while the character stirring the tale and bringing it up to excitement is lame old grandma (Adeline De Walt Reynolds), who can only communicate with her eyes but does so the more. As the thriller develops, it grows more exciting and gripping all the way, and as usual the truth is a shocker - everyone is innocent except the least suspected. Burgess Meredith's experience of this nightmare situation of a lifetime, like being locked up blind in a cage of wolves or worse, that is killers or the electric chair, couldn't be made more realistic by his acting, as this outrageous strain forces him to extreme rationalism, which is exactly the normal human reaction in such circumstances - you set in a higher gear, and thus he manages to make his way out of the death trap of innocent ignorance caught in hopeless darkness of hopelessness. It's a small great film with plenty of stuff for afterthought.

This movie hits all the buttons for Film Noir, and I'm willing to call it so. there are lots of earlier movies with elements that finally fused together to make Film Noir, and many movies that almost hit it around this time (like THE MALTESE FALCON), but Noir was a movement, and it's not leaders that make movements, it's followers, like Jack Hively, the B director of this one.Burgess Meredith is walking down the street when he is knocked down by some rubble from a demolition job. When he gets up, he finds a cigarette case and hat with the wrong initials, and when he goes home, wife Louise Platt tells him he has been missing for more than a year. He goes to the office to get his job back, only to find Sheldon Leonard in hot pursuit. When he goes back to the part of town where he regained his memory, there Claire Trevor is, telling him to get off the street. He's her man and he's wanted for murder.It's based on one of Cornell Woolrich's overwrought crime novels and, as usual, Burgess Meredith plays a nice, amiable fellow, rather wasted. Claire Trevor has all the good lines, and Sheldon Leonard is fine in a straight role. Despite that voice, meant for Runyonesque hoods, he was a good actor.If the answer to the mystery is milked a bit to make the movie last a few minutes longer, the answer still came as a surprise to me. I expect you'll enjoy it, not only for its early, pure Noir, but for a fairly played, if mildly hysterical, mystery.

"Street of Chance" is an old movie that was meant as a B-movie. In other words, a shorter and cheaper film to accompany the main feature. So, even though the story is filled with some silly cliches, I could look past this because the movie wasn't intended to be perfect...or anything close to it!Frank (Burgess Meredith) is walking down a city street when debris from a building falls on him. He's mostly okay...mostly. Although he hasn't broken any bones, he has broken his brain. In other words, he has amnesia and can't remember who he is and has trouble remembering recent details of his life. Eventually, he learns that he's wanted for murder....and he's determined to prove his innocence. To help him with this is a woman (Claire Trevor) who tells Frank she's his girlfriend. But can he trust her or anyone else??The notion of getting bonked on the head and developing an all new personality is popular--particularly in 1950s and 60s TV shows. In reality, such accidents and reactions are rare. Again, I wasn't trying to say it was believable...just mildly interesting and mildly entertaining.