howardeisman

This is a suspense movie about an overexcited woman -with money! Is it going to be a Gaslight knockoff? Lady on a train? Your expectations are set up by previous movies you have seen. Fair enough, but not enough to be completely engrossing. The inevitable twist ending is good enough but hardly great. The plot has holes in it which you could drive an Abrams tank through, but the movie is engrossing enough for you to ignore them-for awhile.

Realizing that they would be at a disadvantage in manpower and advanced weaponry in any large war, the Japanese in the early 20th century adopted military terrorism as a weapon. Japanese serviceman were themselves brutalized and taught to be brutal. When the Chinese city of Nanking proved difficult to conquer, the Japanese army ran amok killing, raping, and looting. Perhaps 250,000 civilians were killed. When the same was happening with Shanghai, the Chinese nationalists ceased to defend their cities and retreated to the interior, still fighting and supported by Anglo-American equipment. This made a Japanese victory in China even more difficult to accomplish.

This is the environment within which Empire of the Sun plays out its story. But its few Chinese characters are dehumanized; none are killed. And the Japanese are presented as heroic warriors, albeit perhaps a tad short tempered. It's one thing to not be true to history but quite another to ignore the overriding tragic milieu within which this story plays out.

What is left is a boy's adventure in a prison camp with a war raging around it. It is episodic; It seems to be set up to get one "high art" scene in and then move on to another high art scene, not necessarily a continuation of where the story has gone previously. Then a few more "high art" sequences are presented after the story has played itself out.

This was written by Tom Stoppard, who, as a child, was dislocated again and again in World War II. I wonder how much of his original script was used.

A diagnostic category of Multiple Personality still exists in the bible of psychiatry, the Diagnostic Statistical Manual, but with a new, "scientific" sounding title: Dissociative Identity Disorder. Unlike any other category in that ponderous tome, the category has two pages of commentary attached to it, essentially saying that it is nonsense.

The idea of a dual personality became rife in Hollywood plots around the time that this movie came out. It was an easy plot gimmick until it was done to death. The idea of multiple personalities became popular forty years later, in entertainment vehicles as well as some outlier areas of psychiatry. A considerable amount of harm was done as naive therapists took this idea seriously.

The movie itself is a minor vehicle with a simplistic plot. It is likely to be entertaining only to those who have not seen the multitude of better dual personality films which followed it. The voice of the evil personality is by Audrey Totter , who always did the bad, bad girl very well. Too bad she doesn't appear in the flesh to add a sultry, dark tone to this movie. It would have helped.