At least it was better than Mister Buddwing

Looking through my DVDs to see what genre of movie I hadn't blogged about lately, I decided that I'd sit down and watch Mirage.

Gregory Peck plays David Stillwell, who at the start of the movie is working on the 27th floor of one of those corporate behemoth buildings in New York. The power has gone out, leaving everybody in the dark and David to walk down 27 flights of stairs to get out of the building. Just behind him is a mysterious woman Shela (Diane Baker); the two have a conversation along the way. They eventually go past the ground floor and through the sub-basements before Shela gets far enough ahead of David that she can just disappear.

When David gets out of the building, he hears an ambulance; it seems as if somebody fell, jumped, or was pushed out of a window in the building where David worked. And it was a 27th floor window. Eventually David goes back to his building to find Shela, and he's shocked to discover that there's no sub-basement! When he gets to his apartment, he finds that there's a man with a gun waiting for him in the hallway. Everybody is wanting him to go see "The Major", whoever that is. David tries to call his boss Josephson (Kevin McCarthy), but uses a number that's out of service. More and more things happen to David that lead him to believe that he's suffering from amnesia. The fact that he's got people chasing him trying to kill him doesn't help.

David tries to go to the police, but they're no help. More alarmingly, he goes to a psychiatrist who is extremely rude to him and doesn't want to help either. Is the pyschiatrist in on the conspiracy? Finally, David turns to a private detective, Ted Cassell (Walter Matthau), who reluctantly takes the case. When they go back to David's building, his old office isn't there, and in the basement that's not a sub-basement, the guy who was there before, Willard (George Kennedy), is there again threatening the two with a gun!

David goes around town trying to piece his past back together. The dead guy, Charles Calvin (Walter Abel) was apparently leading some sort of peace group, and David begins to realize that perhaps he knew Charles. But how? And what are all of David's flashbacks to a conversation on a grassy field about? Worse, David still has to deal with Willard chasing and trying to kill him....

The big problem I had with Mirage was the fact that nothing seemed to fit. Obviously, the movie was structured as it was to try to put the viewers in the predicament of a man who suddenly doesn't know who he was, which is the same conceit as Mister Buddwing a year later. I really disliked that one, and Mirage is only slightly less of a problem for me. I also had big issues with the whole conspiracy theory thing. You can't keep this much a secret, especially not in a big city. Granted, some of the things can probably be explained away by saying they were figures of David's amnesiac imagination. But things like the psychiatrist can't. The impression I got is that he was violating medical ethics treating David the way he did, and for no good reason. The ending also made me feel as though David's amnesia may have been resolved, but the viewers' issues weren't.

Still, this is another of those movies you should probably judge for yourself, and since it was on a cheap box set, it's not as if I wasted too much money on it.