Diagonaldi Very well executed

Contentar Best movie of this year hands down!

Ava-Grace Willis Story: It's very simple but honestly that is fine.

Portia Hilton Blistering performances.

dougdoepke Art critic O'Brien is menaced by unseen forces and must find out who and why.No doubt about it, that train wreck scene is brilliantly conceived and edited. In fact, the whole train sequence amounts to an atmospheric triumph. Catch the passenger car interior when O'Brien opens the door—it fairly oozes closed-in flesh, along with that shrewish wife scolding her hubby on the evils of drink. Few films manage a truly memorable sequence, but this one does.Otherwise, it's a decent noir, though I agree it's also over-plotted and under-explained. Plus, many of those many narrow escapes are simply too contrived to stick. The movie's more one of compelling parts than a successful whole. Nonetheless, O'Brien handles his part in suitably restrained fashion, besides few actors were better at "drop dead" brush-offs, of which he gets to do several. Looks like the normally fast-talking Irishman was refashioning his image to align with the post-war crime drama craze.But my money's on the great Ray Collins. Was there ever a smoother actor, from Citizen Kane (1941) to TV's Perry Mason of the 50's and 60's. Here, he delivers in sinister spades. Then there's poor Mary Ware as the loyally devious secretary. I'm sure she was cast for her totally innocent demeanor and looks, the better to hook the audience. But then, oh my gosh, she has to speak her lines.The movie's subtext is in line with the war's common effort and everyman spirit. The villains act as properly outspoken elitists, first cousins presumably of the recently defeated Nazi's. At the same time, I thought art critic O'Brien's little lecture on the role of "art is what I like" made good sense.All in all, it's a strongly visual, if somewhat turgid, noir that probably did train travel no favors.

sol1218 **SPOILERS** Having helped expose a number of forgeries by the Nazis during WWII former US Army Captain George Steel, Pat O'Brian, got involved in the museum that he was working as a lecturer in the finer points of art. Even though the head curator Mr. Barton, Erskine Sanfod,was a bit taken back by his unsophisticated and earthy manner of how he lectured his audience. Where at time it almost lead to fists flying in his direction.It's when Steel cracked up and made a spectacle of himself one night breaking into the museum belting a policemen and almost getting crushed by a falling statue that things started really getting weird. With the opinion by Dr. Lowell, a member of the museum staff, that Steel lost his mind and needs to be institutionalized he's told to take a long vacation. With Steel calming to have survived a train wreck the night of his crack-up it becomes rather obvious, to both the police and Dr. Lowell, that the poor and confused man is either hallucinating of suffering workers burn-out. Steel doesn't take all this lying down by again going through the same motions that he did the night before. Getting on the same train and taking the same ride, to a town called Marlin. Then finding out that he indeed was not making up the story about his mental crack-up. Only that the train wreck, which he found out didn't happen, was somehow for some reason implanted into his brain! but why and by who?We later learn from a secretly on loan to the museum lawman named Traybin (Herbert Marshall), a Scotland Yard inspector of art forgeries, that things aren't exactly kosher with the art exhibits. Later Steel himself gets this cryptic phone call from his friend the museum's co-curator Stevenson, Damian O'Flynn, about a number of switch's of original masterpieces being copied and then purposely destroyed in suspicious fires. One of them is a painting titled Gainsborough, the originals ended up in the private collection of the person responsible for the destroyed copy.Going to see Stevenson at the museum Steel finds him murdered as he's spotted at the scene of the crime, by Mr. Barton, and becomes the chief suspect in Stevenson's murder. Realizing that this scheme of copying original works. At the same time having the copies destroyed in order, for whoever does it, to steal the original without anyone knowing about it. This has Steel going down to the docks where the painting that was the big hit at the museum "The Adoration of the Kings" is being shipped back to England. With Steel feeling that it's going to suffer the same fate that "Gainsborough" did some time before. With a fire suspiciously set in the storehouse, like Steel suspected, on the ship Steel saves the painting and takes it back to the museum. With the help of his friend reporter Terry Cordell, Claire Trevor, and museum technician Mary Ware, playing herself, Steel finds out through X-rays that the painting is indeed a forgery. Leading to the person responsible, an off-the-wall psycho art lover, of having Steel knocked out and then ,along with Terry, kidnapped. The kidnapper has Steel shot up with truth serum to make him talk talk about who else knows about his, the creepy and murderous lover of arts, diabolical plan. So he can have them done in like he's planing to do in both Steel & Terry.This has to be the only movie where the hero sleeps through the big slam bang final with Steel completely out of it, on the truth serum that put him on snooze control. The police and inspector Traybin come to Steel's and Terry's rescue with Steel later waking up, when all the fighting and shooting is over, and wildly throwing punches at the very people who saved his life, Inspector Traybin and police Capt. Cochrean, Wallace Ford. Yet being so drugged out of is head that he almost ends up falling on his head and breaking it.

Chris Gaskin Crack-Up came on BBC2 one afternoon and as I was out, I recorded this and was pleased I did.An art curator gets a phone call claiming his mother is unwell, so he gets the first train to New York and it turns out this call was a lie and he gets the idea the train has crashed, which it hasn't. He then takes part in a forgery involving fake paintings. Two women are also involved in this but the police catch up with them at the end.Crack-Up is rather atmospheric in parts, especially the New York dockside sequence. It is also light-hearted at times.The cast includes a good performance from Pat O'Brien and is joined by Clare Trevor (Key Largo), Herbert Marshall (The Secret Garden), Wallace Ford and Ray Collins.This is worth viewing at least once. Enjoyable.Rating: 3 stars out of 5.

bmacv The title of Irving Reis' Crack-Up sums up two elements of its plot: the wreck of a train carrying Pat O'Brien and the psychotic episode he throws in its aftermath. He gives lectures at a New York museum, demystifying art for the masses, who obligingly moan reverently at Monet but hoot derisively at Dali. When a phone call (sick mother) summons him upstate, he boards a train on which he freezes like a deer in the headlamp of a renegade engine hurtling straight at him. Oddly, he survives, but upon his return hurls a fire extinguisher through the gallery doors, assaults a policeman, and babbles incoherently about the accident. Trouble is, Mom's in fine fettle, and there was no crash.The movie joins him in sorting out the dramatic turns his life has taken. Helping him is Claire Trevor, a fixture in Manhattan art-snob circles. Herbert Marshall purports to help, too, but he keeps his cards close to his vest. Quite candidly not much help are the museum's board and its snooty benefactors, among them Ray Collins, who were never keen about the democratic spirit O'Brien breathed into their mausoleum and use his erratic behavior to halt his series of light-hearted talks. The police, too, have a stake; O'Brien did, after all, throw that punch....One of the felicities of Crack-Up is that it takes its canvases seriously, putting them at the core of the story. (A similar respect for art, music and theater, and for audiences assumed to have some acquaintance with them, routinely elevated films of the 1940s; times, plainly, have changed.) Of course monetary rather than esthetic value drives the villains here, as O'Brien slowly uncovers an international art scam, which is why he was derailed in the first place.The train crash itself – a very scary sequence, brilliantly handled by Reis – emerges, in the final wrapping-up, as the weakest point of the movie, a baroque twist too far-fetched to convince. Because of this contrivance, the movie cleaves to the over-plotted mysteries of the 1930s and early 1940s rather than to the emergent noir cycle that, in its look and many of its devices, it otherwise resembles. But then there's the always toothsome Claire Trevor, whose ensembles take inspiration from the uniforms of the just-won war; festooned in military braid and berets, she tilts the scales towards noir. Either way, Crack-Up offers some suspenseful fun spiked with a surprising note of sophistication.