- After a test pilot is injured in a plane crash, his fiancée takes him to a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist is unhappily married and has a crush on the fiancée, and attempts to hypnotize the pilot into murdering his wife.
- A test pilot has to bail out whilst breaking the sound barrier and isn't expected to survive, but he does. He isn't physically injured but he has psychological problems that his doctor can only treat with pain killing injections. The pilot's fiancee is the niece of a famous psychiatrist and she persuades him to take the pilot on as his patient, even though he is retired. The pilot moves into the psychiatrist's apartment for convenience and undergoes daily treatment involving hypnosis. Whenever the pilot experiences a psychological episode, he doesn't remember anything afterwards and the psychiatrist is convinced that there are suppressed memories at the root of his problems. One day the pilot meets a woman who lives in the block as he is leaving. She has a pile of boxes as a result of her shopping trip and he offers to help carry them. She is aloof and imperious and as he puts her parcels down in her apartment, she chides him for being clumsy, and sends him on his way. Other people later acknowledge how unfriendly she is. During a treatment session that probes his childhood the pilot runs out in distress, still hypnotized. He wanders around not knowing his name or much else about his life. He is missing overnight and the next morning remembers enough to make his way back to his fiancee's home. She tells him that she travelled to his childhood town and discovered what happened that caused his trauma. He resumes treatment with the psychiatrist and at the end of the day he goes to bed. Shortly afterwards the porter notices a figure climbing down the outside of the building while he smokes a cigarette. Just then the phone rings sending the porter running back in and it is the unfriendly woman, who gasps for help and chokes. Meanwhile, the pilot suddenly enters the psychiatrist's apartment through the French windows looking distressed, without any memory of recent events. The psychiatrist shows the pilot a pendant that he says he had in his hand but says he will hide it. He indicates that he thinks the pilot has murdered the woman, but says they can provide an alibi for each other via the treatment session. The police investigation reveals that the murdered woman is in fact the psychiatrist's wife, who has refused to divorce him. She is now a famous author living under her maiden name. Although the psychiatrist secretly incriminates the pilot to the police the sequence of events belies his story. He confesses when confronted with the anomalies that he hypnotized the pilot to murder his wife, but when the pilot couldn't, he did it himself. It seems that he had loved his niece for years and hoped she might turn to him after his wife was dead and her fiance was imprisoned.
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By what name was Scotland Yard Dragnet (1957) officially released in Canada in English?
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