Den vita katten

From Sweden directed in 1950, "the white cat" is an interesting amnesia complex story of a man trying to recover his memory. Not a masterpiece, but quite atmospheric and creepy with a few sexy scenes. And lot of scenes on location in Stockholm.

The story doesn't make sense and commits the cardinal clunkiness of requiring an add-on scene for convoluted exposition after it's basically wrapped up ('There's still a few things I don't quite understand...').

But for 1950, the depiction of nihilistic bohemian junkies seems fascinatingly ahead of its time and gives us a wonderfully poisonous antagonist.

I'm just a little concerned that, to convey this evil, a cat may really have been shot dead on screen.

A handsome young man arrives in Stockholm by train one night. He has no money or identification, but in his pockets are a set of keys and a paper with an address and a phone number. He has no memory of who he is or where he came from. He overhears people discussing an escaped mental patient, a sex offender, who bears his exact description. A waitress at the station, played by the great Eva Henning, takes him under her wing and puts him up for the night. He has a fear of white cats.

It's a compelling set-up, and has all the components of a great Ekman piece: the lurid sexuality (similar to Mattsson and Bergman of the period), dream sequences that offer keys to a fractured psyche, an existential entanglement of multiple identities... And the first act lives up to that. But from there the film sort of crumbles underneath its weighty and ultimately nonsensical plot.

By the final act, many of the film's more intriguing plot points have been entirely ignored and forgotten, and the resolution will leave you more perplexed than satisfied. Henning is not given enough screen time, or a strong enough character. Enjoyable, but not a great film.