News of the Weird

I came across the following interesting (but completely unrelated to movies) story in my RSS reader this morning: Lost Woman Looks for Herself in Iceland’s Highlands. To make a long story short, the driver of the tour bus she was on didn't recognize her after she changed clothes, and somehow the passenger count got screwed up. The woman had no idea she was the one they were supposed to be looking for.

There has to be a movie comedy in this somewhere. In fact, I mentioned the lousy movie Go Chase Yourself a month ago, in which Joe Penner doesn't realize at first the police want him, while his wife is only helping the police look for a missing man, not a criminal.

Ray Milland leads a criminal investigation into himself in The Big Clock, although that's only because his boss (Charles Laughton) is forcing him to lead the investigation.

Police would be likely people to pull off such a tactic: commit a crime and then lead the investigation into the crime. One example of this that springs to mind is Van Heflin in The Prowler.

Fred MacMurray as an investigating cop tried to pull off a double-cross in Pushover, which doesn't quite fit the category. At first I was thinking that Double Indemnity didn't fit either, since it's Edward G. Robinson leading the insurance fraud investigation. But then, MacMurray is assisting. Another double-cross occurs in The Money Trap, in which police detective Glenn Ford tries to steal a bunch of money from Joseph Cotten, assisted by his buddy on the beat Ricardo Montalban.