Brainstorm

By the time "Brainstorm" was made, both Jeffrey Hunter and Dana Andrews had descended into B films. "Brainstorm" was one of them, costarring '50s starlet Anne Francis.

Directed by William Conrad, it's actually a good movie about an engineer who falls in love with the unhappy wife of a wealthy man (Andrews) and concocts a scheme to kill him and get away with it by faking insanity.

Hunter is very good in this dramatic role - he was a far better actor than some of his contemporaries but due to his personal demons, he never fulfilled his early promise. It's a shame because he played this kind of angry, edgy role very well, belying his staggering good looks. He gets good support from Andrews, Francis, and Viveca Lindfors, who plays a psychiatrist.

There is one scene that may be unintentionally funny - when Hunter is in the asylum, one of the inmates starts singing the beginning of a song over and over again. Hunter finally screams, "Either finish that song or SHUT UP!" Brainstorm is worth a watch, especially to see Hunter do a role deserving of his abilities, and one he no longer had an opportunity to play in A films.

This is a nasty story about a quite orderly ambitious and very talented young scientist who runs into bad luck in the shape of a woman, who happens to be the wife of his employer billionaire, financing projects like Apollo for the moon. She is not happy with him although she has everything including a lovely little daughter, and our man runs into her as she is trying to commit suicide parking her car in a railway crossing being dead drunk. He saves her, and there it starts - he should never have done that. Although he gets warnings, he gets involved with her to the degree of psychosis, so he is willing to do anything for her and does it with very serious consequences - his tragedy is that he in his love never again can control himself nor his life but just has to follow the hole way of his consistent delusion. Jeff Hunter makes the role very well, she is no better than she should be, Dana Andrews as the elderly billionaire husband is very much Dana Andrews, while the one who saves the film is Viveca Lindfors as the psychiatrist. She is always beautiful, always makes a great appearance and is an ideal actress in her cool beauty, and thanks to her the film is bearable, although you must have serious objections to the intrigue, allowing him to totally lose all sernse of self preservation. It is a neo-noir but lacks the stamina and convincing flow of the classical noirs of the 40s. The stoyt couldn't end otherwise, it is consistently logic all the way, and the two women that betray him couldn't do otherwise either, being as they are. He only has himself to blame for his stupidity in all his brilliant genius. "Do you have brains, Einstein? Use it!" He doesn't, or that is where he fails in going too far in using it for his uncontrolled needs of desperation instead of coolly working on reasonable detachment just for ordinary human survival.

Certainly, the movie is worth the watch.

Insane or not Insane? That is the Question! What is the answer? (See my board post which answers that but contains spoilers there.) Well, you better take notes and watch carefully, because you might have to go back and re-watch a few scenes. Yeah, one of those nice suspense movies. :) The director here is in tune with the message, and will play with you using a tiny bit of Hitchcock like style, but it's a well crafted movie. Yes, there are some rough spots around the edges, but one should certainly watch it for the great story and pretty good acting by both the scientist and the women.

Break out the popcorn and watch the end closely! Good movie for the time period. Still fits for today. Nicely directed.

After being seduced by the unstable wife of his millionaire boss, a brilliant young engineer concocts a crackpot plan for the two to be together: murder her husband and then convince a panel of psychiatrists that he is clinically insane (the rationale being, I assume, that incarceration in a mental asylum is much preferable to prison!). Warner Bros. potboiler with a television budget--another in a string of pulpy, somewhat-sleazy yarns to be directed by William Conrad--is engrossing and enjoyable, even as it fails to come to much. Conrad works well with his actors while concentrating firmly on his narrative, however his scene transitions are amateurish and his work is not helped by the TV drama-styled editing (not to mention the melodramatic music cues). Jeffrey Hunter (curiously billed as Jeff Hunter) begins the film behaving like a staunch, overgrown Boy Scout, but by the second-half really goes out on a limb with the tics, cold sweats, and stammers of a man driven half-mad by desire. Screenwriter Mann Rubin preys upon the viewer's fear of insanity by setting our hero up as a dupe, a willing 'Gaslight' victim who may not be one-hundred-percent in the head anyway. There are no surprise twists to the plot, nor do Conrad or Rubin mean this to be a cautionary tale for would-be illicit lovers. It's rather a squarely straightforward tale with incidental characters (such as Viveca Lindfors' sweetly smiling doctor) who are never fully explained and a finale that is meant to be highly shocking. **1/2 from ****

This is probably the most complex role I ever saw Jeff (no - rey) Hunter ever undertake, and he's actually not at all bad. He is "Grayam", a man who comes to the aid of the slightly inebriated wife of his boss. "Lorrie" (Anne Francis) is considerably more grateful than her husband "Benson" (Dana Andrews) and it soon becomes clear that she has the hots for him and he, however reluctantly at first, is beginning to reciprocate. Pretty swiftly they are having an affair and rather curiously her husband seems to know all about it and care not a jot. He knows his wife will never leave her wealthy and confortable life - he plays a manipulative game and he plays it well. To thwart this, the two come up with a plan to eliminate "Benson" in plain sight and to cleverly orchestrate the scenario so as to allow his use of a plea of insanity. He sows the seeds well, gradually convincing all around him that he's not the full shilling before... What he didn't really reckon on though was the fickleness of "Lorrie" and the adeptness of the court-appointed psychiatrist "Larstadt" (Viveca Lindfors) who plays well here as the doctor who clearly knows how to play this game of intellectual cat and mouse every bit as well as her quarry. It's perhaps a little too long - too much time is spent on the establishment scenes, but Hunter, Francis and Lindfors are effective here as William Conrad gradually builds this into a sophisticated psychological drama that twists and turns nicely before a denouement that I found to be suitably pathetic. It's rarely seen these days, and may be a bit tame by 21st century standards, but it is a strong and characterful story that is well delivered and well worth a watch.