Summary
A moonlit drawing-room, velvet drapes breathing with the breeze, becomes the stage for a parlour trick that detonates destiny: stage mesmerist The Great Marlowe snaps his pocket-watch shut and, with a smirk as thin as a razor, programmes affable banker George Clayton to slaughter railroad titan Harrison Kirk ‘before the next sunrise’. Laughter ripples through the tuxedoed onlookers—except the cosmos, arch-prankster, records every chuckle. Hours bleed away; a revolver cracks in the fog down by the wharf; Kirk’s silhouette folds like a marionette whose strings are cut. When dawn’s first zinc-grey shaft spears the sky, Clayton regains consciousness on a tram bench, blood freckling his cuff, pockets harbouring a ticket stub he cannot remember purchasing. From here the narrative corkscrews inward: a manhunt conducted inside one skull, every streetlamp a Grand-Inquisitorial eye, every casual acquaintance a potential corroborator of a crime he might have blissfully executed while spell-sleepwalking. The film becomes a kaleidoscope of lapsed memories—flash-cut inserts of a gloved hand twisting a doorknob, a woman’s shoe abandoned on a pier—intercut with Clayton’s frantic attempts to reconstruct the vanished hour. Is he predator, prey, or both? Even the camera refuses exoneration, circling him in dizzying 360-degree pans that mimic a lie-detector needle spinning out of control. Nilsson’s society sculptress, Adele Farrington’s spiritualist aunt, and a crusading reporter (Edmund Burns) form a human triangulation around Clayton, each vying to pull him toward a divergent verdict: salvation, damnation, or the asylum. Resolution arrives not with a confession but with a chiaroscuro tableau in which guilt and hypnosis dissolve into the same silhouette, leaving the audience clutching an ethical Rubik’s cube that still clicks long after the house lights return.
Synopsis
George Clayton is amused when a hypnotist commands him to kill Harrison Kirk. But later, when Kirk is killed, Clayton fears he may himself have carried out the hypnotic suggestion and become a murderer.
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