1 hour and 6 minutes, rated 6.4 by 301 cinematizens.
Genre: Krimi
Verdict: Redemption.
An amnesia victim is rescued up by Lieutenant Tragg posing as a kindly, country doctor. Tragg tries all the plays in the script to rekindle Amnesia’s memory. No go. Time passes.
Victim gets depressed and is snapped out of it by a love interest, and Tragg challenges him to make something of himself. ‘Few men have a second chance and he should take it.’ This dramatic tension is well played.
Victim transforms himself into….[drum roll], the Crime Doctor, a combination of physician and psychologist. Ten years passes while he transforms.
Then in no time he has reformed innumerable criminals. All the while a mysterious stranger is lurking about who tells Crime Doctor that he knows he a faking amnesia. He is not, but he worries about what Lurker knows that he doesn’t.
Turns our Victim (aka Crime Doctor) was a criminal mastermind who made off with a fortune, when prosperity was just around the corner, and then he lost his memory and with it the loot. Lurker with two associates want a cut, even these ten years later.
Whew! Is this plot thick, or what? There are lumps in this gravy alright.
Victim recovers his memory, singlehandedly captures Lurker and gang, finds the dosh, and surrenders himself to the authorities.
He is put on trial as a split personality. Think Clockwork Orange. He is tried for what Victim/Villain did but the man on trial is pillar of virtue Crime Doctor. Get it? What the fraternity brothers got was a headache.
He admits Victim/Villain’s guilt while claiming Crime Doctor’s innocence. Both inhabit the same body! What to do? There is some nice satire about the journalists covering the trial. On Fox News Hillary is blamed.
Find him guilty and let him go, that’s what.
It is all nicely done, though disbelief has to be suspended with Victim, the 55-year old Warner Baxter, who is ostensibly 30 at the start. Whoa. Not only does he look 55, he also looks ill. He did eight of these programers.
Crime Doctor was a multimedia hit at the time. It ran in newspapers, over the airwaves of radio, and in this and the subsequent series of films.
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