O'Brien is an art expert who had served in the Army exposing Nazi forgeries and is now one of the officials of a New York museum. Just before he is to give a lecture using his X-ray device to demonstrate how to spot a bogus piece of art, he loses consciousness. O'Brien is first shown
crashing through a museum door, and from there the furious pace of this story never slows. He is suspended for his erratic behavior, which he claims is the result of a train wreck. He cannot, however, explain what has happened between the time of the wreck and his outburst in the museum. Trevor,
his girl friend and a reporter, along with Marshall, a secret official for Scotland Yard investigating art forgeries, help O'Brien piece the missing moments together. He is the victim of a plot, it turns out, masterminded by elitist art collector Collins, who realized that O'Brien could have
inadvertently discovered one of the forgeries he had placed in the museum. Collins and others have been systematically looting the museum, replacing the great masterworks with clever forgeries and compelling the museum director, Sanford, to go along with the scheme. O'Brien's blackout was
engineered by the devious Collins, who had administered sodium pentothal to create in his mind a train wreck that never existed and to erase his recollection of witnessing a murder. In retracing his steps, O'Brien runs into danger everywhere, but he survives and exposes the evil Collins, who spits
out his hatred for "democratic art" at film's end: "Did you ever want to possess something that was unattainable? These masters became everything in life to me...Unfortunately museums have a habit of wasting good art on dolts who can't distinguish between it and trash."
CRACK-UP, the first film directed by Reis after he left the Army, is a tight, suspenseful film with eerie cinematography that puts it solidly in the realm of classic film noir. O'Brien is terrific as the groping victim, and Collins is wry and hatefully shrewd as the manipulating gobbler of art.
Although way above standard in every detail, this film, with its flashbacks and flash forwards, and a script with a few holes in it, did not do as well at the box office as RKO production chief Charles Koerner expected. He died of leukemia during the filming. When Koerner's close friend, mogul
David O. Selznick, heard of his condition, he spent a great deal of money trying to get opinions on treatment from world medical experts but to no avail. Koerner's death was also a great blow to O'Brien, who considered him the reason for the studio's financial well-being. "With his passing,"
O'Brien later stated, "the great days of RKO were over. It did little more than limp along until Desi Arnaz gobbled it up for TV." leave a comment