Review of Strange Illusion

Edgar G. Ulmer, the auteur of Detour, directed this mystery inspired by Hamlet. Gawky teenager James Lyden is troubled by dreams of the death of his father, a prominent criminologist. The dreams make him uneasy about his mother's courtship by Warren Williams, a suave gigolo. Voluntarily checking himself into a sanitarium run by the psychiatrist who's a confederate of Williams', Lydon hopes to find evidence for his suspicions. Bad move, for in the forties psychiatrists were charlatans (if not worse), and asylums the equivalent of Old Dark Houses in the thirties.... The talkiness and, frankly, cheesiness that adventitiously became virtues in Detour do not augur well in the first half-hour or so of Strange Illusion. But then the story gains traction, in a simplistic, Hardy-Boys sort of way. Despite its literary pretensions, it's an oddly cozy little noir from an era when the words "adolescent" and "angst" were seldom used in tandem.