Brainstorm

The scientist Jim Grayam saves a woman who is trying to kill herself in a car stopped on a railway track one night. She is his boss's wife. An affair begins between them; the husband is a bully and treats her badly. Jim works out a plan: to cover a murder with an insanity defence. The plan looks flawless. William Conrad, who moved from acting into directing, made this film. Jeffrey Hunter and Anne Francis take the leads, with Dana Andrews as the husband. The telling runs through the asylum and the insanity defence; in the sixties that subject was only beginning to open up in cinema. The ending does not go where the audience expects.