Brainstorm (1965)

Dana Andrews was TCM's Star of the Month back in July, and one of his movies that I hadn't seen before was the 1965 Brainstorm. (There's the proably more famous 1983 movie Brainstorm, the movie Natalie Wood was making at the time of her death, that has a completely different plot.) The plot of the 1965 Brainstorm sounded interesting, so I recorded it and just recently watched it to, as always, do a post on it here.

Jeffrey Hunter (billed as Jeff, not Jeffrey) plays Jim Grayam (yes, that's the spelling), who works doing computer analysis of weapons systems for Benson Industries, one of those defense contractors that dot the Southern California landscape. One night, as he's leaving work, he spots a car that's stalled on the train tracks. Worse, there's a woman in there who looks to be unconscious if not dead. And Jim can hear a train coming. Not being able to wake up the woman, Jim breaks one of the windows and gets the car off the tracks just in time.

Jim looks through the woman's belongings for identification, and finds that she's... Lorrie Benson (Anne Francis), the wife of Jim's ultimate boss, Cort Benson (Dana Andrews)! Jim is going to have to break the bad news, and worse, Jim figures out that since the car didn't have any mechanical issues, Lorrie was really trying to commit suicide. Imagine having to be the one to do that with one's boss.

Jim gets to the Benson mansion, and finds that Lorrie is deeply unhappy that Jim saved her, as she feels trapped in a loveless marriage with Cort using his power to prevent any other man from getting close to her -- there have been quite a few men before, apparently. But when Lorrie learns that Jim didn't save her for any sort of monetary or work-related reward, she decides that she's going to try to pursue him romantically.

Cort figures out what's going on, and uses his power as head of the company to make it look as though Jim is going nuts at work. Decidedly not helping Jim in this regard is the fact that he already has a history of mental instability, having suffered a breakdown in college. But this, combined with his increasingly falling in love with Lorrie, gives him a wacky idea that couldn't possibly work in real life, never mind in a movie that was made when there were still some of the restrictions of the Production Code.

Jim decides he's going to kill Cort, but also to try to get himself declared not guilty by reason of insanity, so that he'll be sent to a hospital, from where he can then fairly quickly get himself proved not insane after all. When it comes time for the psychiatrists to determine whether or not Jim is sane or not, the head of the committee examining him is Dr. Larstadt (Viveca Lindfors). Jim seems to be falling in love with her, too....

There's a seed of an interesting plot in Brainstorm, but the movie goes off the rails, I think, in no small part from the script being rather unrealistic. The only thing that it does well -- and I wonder whether this was unintentional -- is to make the viewer wonder at the end whether Jim was ever sane. But Cort is never fully fleshed out, and Lorrie seems one-dimensional in her on instability. The direction (by future TV star William Conrad) was somewhat jarring at times with its cuts and pans, but that may have been a deliberate attempt to keep the viewer off-kilter. (If it was deliberate, it succeeded.)

Brainstorm is an interesting misfire that may leave other viewers as frustrated as it left me. But it probably deserves one viewing, at least, if only to figure out where everything goes wrong.