TCM had a spotlight a couple months back on B movies, in which they showed a bunch of movies that I hadn't seen before. This gve me the chance to record them and watch, and it's only now that I'm beginning to get to them. First up is Identity Unknown.
Richard Arlen plays, well, I can't give you the name of the character because at the beginning of the movie he doesn't really have a name. The movie was released in early 1945, or in the late stages of World War II. The character was found near death in a farmhouse in France, together with three other GIs, except that the other three were dead already. They were killed by some sort of explosion that somehow knocked the dog tags off of them with the result that Army doctors can't put each set of tags back with the soldier who wore them. And of course, this was the days before they knew what DNA was, so it's not as if they could do an identification that way. (Also surprisingly, apparently none of the four had dental records.)
The other reason I can't give the name of the Arlen character is that he wakes up in the Army hospital with a fairly severe case of amnesia, such that he doen't remember his identity; if he did, we wouldn't have much of a movie, now, would we? The one thing that saves Arlen's character is that the Army has the last known addresses of each of the four soldiers whose dog tags were in that farmhouse. Perhaps after being released from the hospital and demobbed this soldier, who has taken on the name Johnny March because, well, he does need a name after all, even if it's an obviously fake one, can go to each of the four addresses until somebody recognizes him.
The train that the Army puts him on goes through one of the towns on Johnny's list, so he gets off there to try to cross off the first name on that list. Except that he hasn't been given official leave yet, so he's technically AWOL, if not being treated as a deserter. Now, you'd think the Army could have cleared this up with the MPs, but that doesn't seem happen until the end of the movie. That town in Connecticut is home to Sally MacGregor (Cheryl Walker), who was the wife of the man whose name was on the dog tags. Johnny claims to be a friend of the man, at least once he learns he's not the man in question. Sally begins to develop feelings for him, but she's also not happy about being duped.
Johnny then goes to West Virginia where he meets a boy (Bobby Driscoll) who's lost his father; the brother of a soldier from Chicago who was involved in illegal gambling; and finally the parents of a farmer in Iowa who are planning to sell off the family farm now that their son is dead. But if none of these four people were Johnny, than just who is Johnny? And how did he lose his dog tags only for them never to be found?
Identity Unknown is the sort of movie where, if you think about it, there are a whole lot of plot holes. As I was watching the movie, I thought about the Gary Merrill film Phone Call from a Stranger, which has some of the same themes but handles them a lot better. But then, that wasn't a B movie. For a B film from a studio like Republic that rarely could afford to have a large budget, Identity Unknown isn't a bad little movie. And it's only about 70 minutes, so it's you like you'll have invested too much of your time if you don't particularly care for it. But I think you'll like it.
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