Crack-Up

George Steele, an art curator, remembers surviving a train crash. There was no crash; he never boarded that train. Nobody believes him and he is having trouble believing himself: is he coming apart, or has somebody put him in this state deliberately? The trail leads back to the museum where he works and to the paintings hanging in it. Irving Reis made one of the less known films noir, and its subject is oddly current: forgery, the reputation of institutions, and a man unable to trust his own memory. Pat O'Brien and Claire Trevor play it. The tension is built on doubt rather than gunfire, and right to the end you cannot decide which version is true.