William Powell's Retrograde Psychedelic Amnesia: CROSSROADS, I LOVE YOU AGAIN

Amnesia is always a great topic for the movies, furnishing a built-in self-reflexivity vis-à-vis the movie watching experience itself. We all start any movie an amnesiac (unless it's a sequel or based on a book we've read), instinctively sizing up clues as to what's what and who's where and why when. As far as narrative identity, we start the film lacking the whole backstory of each character, and we could wind up identifying with, rooting for, or against, nearly anyone until finally the good and bad pieces sort themselves out. In two very different and worthwhile amnesia movies, the comedy I LOVE YOU AGAIN (1940) and the noir mystery CROSSROADS (1942), William Powell plays an amnesiac bounder who suffered a radical personality change when was hit on the head, ten or so years before the film begins, and its left him a staid stalwart and sober citizen, the opposite of our beloved rogue Nick Charles. In LOVE, he receives a second bump on the head and returns to his past bounder self; in CROSSROADS, the bounder self awakens to find him. Either way, if split-self compartmentalization be the music of a sober AA paragon constantly re-telling tales of his wild and drunken past, split on.

I LOVE YOU AGAIN was the big break that launched the Powell amnesiac trend, a rollicking comedy that Powell aces in a complicated leading role opposite his perfect cinematic mate, Myrna Loy. The drab wartime fashions and broad gray palette the indicate that comedy, not art direction is the order of the day. CROSSROADS, on the other hand, is a Hitchcock by way of Sirk noir melodrama, all long Siodmak midnight blacks and murky Parisian novel plotting. In film, William Powell's conk on the head-amnesia brings an initial run of sobriety and loyal decency - and getting hit on the head again might mean a reversion to his criminal side. To give away more would spoil them, spoil the post-modern amnesiac cinema frisson, but just know that in LOVE he starts out as Larry Wilson, a small town tea-totaling bore on a cruise who gets conked on the head diving overboard to rescue a drunk Frank McHugh. When Larry wakes from his conk in his stateroom, it's not as old staid Larry but his original self, George Carey, a charming, quick-thinking grifter much more like the William Powell we love. Realizing his interim self, Larry, about whom he remembers nothing, might be rich, this George Carey--with eyes alight and body careening around the stateroom--makes plans to loot his bank account, assisted by Frank McHugh, who turns out to be a fellow con man and immediately has the good sense to latch on for the ride. I love this early scene because Powell plays it like I used to feel during those early sophomore year psychedelic trips (right), where all my old worries and dull habits melted away and I was alive to the possibilities life offered when fear and torpor were suddenly dissolved, pacing the dorm room like it was a new dawn, my old self a thing of the past, an old husk of a cocoon. It felt like morning regardless of the actual hour. ELECTRIC LADYLAND blaring, and a hitherto unknown part of myself emerging like a paisley butterfly from my cracked-open forehead, me terrifying the flakey brother slowly drinking all my beer over in the corner on my groundscored couch; I even walked out of my dorm and left the building, with my door unlocked and wide open, music still playing on my turntable, all lights on in the dead of night, so free was I of all concern. Naturally, I wasn't robbed. I couldn't be harmed as long as I was so high up. Here Powell exhibits that same aliveness, for nothing wakes the soul more than being delivered from its signifiers.


Returning to Larry's home town, McHugh posing as Larry's doctor to explain why "Larry" must have lots of rest and be excused if he acts peculiarly, as in not recognizing Myrna Loy waving at him when he gets off the train. "He must have lots of alcohol!" Larry's ten years of sobriety he doesn't remember as Carey was surely good for his liver. Now he can get back to processing THIN MAN-level toxins. But will George's attraction to Loy get in the way of this noble plundering and deep elbow-bending? It's pretty funny when he meets her on the dock and can't tell who she is, the wife, girlfriend, random stranger, or does she just thinks he's hot, the way Kay Francis did in ONE WAY PASSAGE? It turns out she's in the process of divorcing him because his old self was so sexually inhibited and boring. She's unaware he's now this other character from before they were married. George is everything Larry wasn't, but he can't tell her he changed lest she wise up and deny him Larry's riches. Can he meld the two and become a less chicanerous but not boring whole self? Can he, in short, drink moderately?



In the end, if he's a much closer approximation to his savvy souse of the THIN MAN movies than a noble bore, he's the very man for her. But let's face it, having such a drunken rogue as a husband requires indulgence, tolerance, and her own level of booziness to not get mighty fed up. Once can only imagine what the nights are like when there's no murder to solve. If Nick's hollow leg was like mine, sooner or later that thing is just filled and it can never be emptied.

I Love You Again (1941)

It's interesting too because they're both getting older, so Loy's no-longer-patient wife is less able to embody those tolerance tropes. And you can tell their rapport is strained because they have such affection for each other as actors it hurts to see them hurt themselves hurting each other. Drinking men Loy's age slide into sobriety, moderation, or an alcoholic ward with Bim and his little turkeys in straw hats. They seldom get a second chance to detox their liver for ten years before they, as we say in AA, turn from cucumber to pickle, and there's no way to turn a pickle back into a cucumber. For an actress whose been granted-- or perhaps burdened--with excessive MGM-brand dignity to make her romance with either version of Powell believable, Loy's had to mellow, and so they seem like Nick and Nora Charles if Nick joined AA and got super boring and preachy for ten years and Nora was so sick of how unfun-Bobby he'd become she filed for divorce and started dating the local Bellamy, but when Nick relapses she loves him again and hence the title! His co-dependent stammering and soft-shoeing and trying to get her drunk make a weak wooing combo, but it all starts to work, as the magic of booze always does, until it finally doesn't, and takes off its loving mask to reveal the cold sadistic demon beneath. But who can't forgive a little torture when even if just for a moment the true bliss?

Love Crazy (same year; same dress? tries too hard)

This movie is awesome so it begs the question, why haven't I seen it sooner? I've drunk more bourbon watching THIN MAN than most people drink in their entire lifetime. But I got I LOVE YOU AGAIN confused with the far lamer LOVE CRAZY, another Myrna Loy-William Powell comedy of remarriage, which I watched back before I had read Stanley Cavell and knew what to look for and so disliked it, and still haven't been able to get into DOUBLE WEDDING, which I was so bummed out by LOVE CRAZY, I got confused and thought all non-THIN MAN Loy-Powells were as wartime watered-down as Garbo's TWO-FACED WOMAN (also 1941). I shouldn't have been so brittle, I could have been drinking to so much more! Shrooming, too. For LOVE YOU AGAIN's giddy stateroom awakening from stale Larry to foxy George is as about as succinct an encapsulation of dorm-at-dawn sophomore year peaking as I've seen in some time.

There's a bouncy script  and some great bits that just fly by: Frank McHugh staggering around the ship bar in the opening scene shortly before falling overboard, a patron at the bar notes McHugh appears intoxicated. "wha'd he say?" asks Frank McHugh -- "intoxicated," the bartender's drunk himself so it sounds like "he toxicated.""He did that?" McHugh asks appalled--- and you realize he heard 'he toxicated' which sounds brazenly gaseous. There's also some snazzy rousting of Herbert (Donald Douglas) Loy's dimwit new boyfriend  (i.e. 'the Bellamy') while she and Larry are in the midst of divorcing, and man, what good, dirty writers could do with the old trope about 'coming upstairs to look at my snapshots' or in this case, taxidermy ("I'll never stuff another squirrel as long as I live!") In some ways it's like the screwball version of BIGGER THAN LIFE!!

But the THIN MAN chemistry is like a faded rose, and that adds a vibe of sadness --we've come to rely on their sophisticated co-dependent chemistry to invigorate our ever-threatened conceptions of an ideal marriage. We loved how Nora would pretend to be sore at him for his constant drinking, how relieved we were in she smiled that wry pixie nose wrinkle half-smile to indicate she's just as pro-alcohol as he is after prepping us for one of those drab buzzkill wife sermons so common to lesser romantic mysteries (such as in RKO's attempt at the THIN MAN formula, STAR OF MIDNIGHT --see "Without a Slur"). So it breaks our heart to see how Loy has given up on on tea-totaling Larry so long ago, for we know alcohol is the spinach for this marriage's Popeye, and he's near dead from iron deficiency). So it becomes intrinsic to him to inflate the old give-and-take back to life, to avoid being bumped on the head certainly and most of all to strike it rich with a phony oil deal though it takes him forever to figure out. Many areas of small town life are milked for comedic goofusness, including a Boy Scouts award ceremony, the department store razzing for being cheap in the past, a reminder why so many of us live in big cities, where no one ever knows your name and an American is judged not on the color of his stripes or his ability to sublimate sexual desire into tiresome Norman Rockwell community-building, but on his wit and in-the-moment alacrity. In real life this guy would have been a powerful bad hustler. He's got a great set up for some confident flim-flam, but Frank McHugh hustles circles of quick-thinking around him, and Edmund Lowe glowers impressively while he sets up the submerged phony oil can.


In LOVE, Powell the grifter wakes up from a nine year coma of being Powell the staid bore; in CROSSROADS (1942) that same (slightly cooler) bore's a diplomat in Paris who woke up with amnesia after a bad boat accident ten years earlier, and so can't account for much of his grifter gangster past -- but he's been his new self long enough he's married a gorgeous European gal (Hedy Lamar, never prettier), and become a trusted success. A letter arrives requesting money owed by his old shady self, a self he has no memory of, and the intrigue begins. Just as each personality didn't know anything about the life of the other in I LOVE YOU AGAIN, here we have the grifter emerge only in the court depositions of the old molls and jakes who come out of the woodwork to be cross-examined in what may be the coolest most intelligently written court scene ever (Parisian, naturellement). By jove, there's none of the excess legal jargon that clouds the pens of lesser hacks. Claire Trevor is the savvy showgirl grifter shadow to Lamar's playful Grace Kelly-esque younger wife; then there's Basil Rathbone leading nose-first into the proceedings, leaving us to wonder if blackmail's just another word for you owe me money but you don't remember. How convenient.


Right off the bat, CROSSROADS lets us know we're in strange country: a brazen student at his witty lecture seduces David (Powell) in a car it later turns out to be his wife, a fun jest that casts a weird glow over the rest of the film, like he could be playing the same game on the audience and his friends from the get-go, and a lawyer here is even smart enough to ask how long an actor might stay in character before he officially becomes that character, as in common law marriage or naturalization. At an hour or less (ala Lamar's ruse) it's just sparkling play amongst sophisticated people; at over an hour its theatrical acting; at over a month it's dissociative identity disorder (DID); at over five years it's retrograde amnesia. Longer than that, it's who the person really is; now the old, original self is the act.

Helping matters is the out-of-time feel of the figures from David's past (when he was Jean Pelletier). Lamar seems modern like a Velvet Underground version of Grace Kelly in REAR WINDOW but the mysterious woman claiming to be Jean's old flame (Claire Trevor -left), wears her hair piled high like she just drifted in from the 19th century; and in her shadows lurks the aquiline silhouette of mighty Rathbone, stalwart heavy of Victorian mellers. The wet soundstage impression of a noir Paris muddies and blurs (maybe its TCM's print) like ink gouache across a....oh, man, but Heidi's pretty.

Also showing up is Sig Ruman as a bad doctor, Frank Bressart as a good one, and there's lots of great navigating the language and class barriers and Babel towers, like a blind man feeling for the bathroom in the dead of night. The script is maturely engaging and thought provoking without needing to rely on cheap thrills, soap or sentiment. David regularly makes smart decisions we normally don't see his brand of noir protagonist make.

The mature noir chain to LOVE YOU's bouncy Runyon pendant, CROSSROADS might not be as lively but it's got its own weird midnight beauty and might have my favorite Lamar performance. And to think I avoided both films for years because I got them mixed up with DOUBLE WEDDING and LOVE CRAZY, both of which I saw and was gravely underwhelmed by.

Hey, it's not my fault, it's the dumb titles and similar plots. Without the THIN MAN structure, the chemistry of Loy and Powell often overflowed and swamped lesser vehicles, especially if dragged under by frilly post-code censorship and daftly interchangeable, meaningless titles. LOVE CRAZY was made after I LOVE YOU AGAIN, with a similar comedic plot (acting insane to prevent a divorce). CROSSROADS followed, more serious, sans Loy, but with a similar amnesia formula, further adding to my split self confusion upon reading the blurb (i.e. mixing up LOVE YOU AGAIN with LOVE CRAZY, then CROSSROADS with I LOVE YOU AGAIN).

 So there you go the whole story of two films about assumed identities and fading marriages rekindled by lively alter-egos, and me, a viewer so confused by their bland titles that I waited to see them until this latter period in my film watching life. Don't make the same mistakes I did and let fuzzy blows to the head or drugs to the pineal fuzz your roll into the suicide split screen duplicate machine. Powell makes the jump with mere conks to the noggin. Can you do less? The screen shall split you whole if you don't mind first surrendering your individuality in the service of a grand war. Does that mean relapse, or just a feigned slur? Sometimes drunkenness isn't the same thing as not being sober. This is one of those times. It's called the movies.