MOVIEGOER

It must have been an awful lot of fun writing the script for "Crossroads." It must have been an awful lot of fun directing it, and acting in it, too. For from start to finish it is obvious that no one went out of his way to be consistent or convincing. And a production that allows the writer's imagination to ramble without restraint, and lets the director fool around with all manner of disconnected dramatic scenes, and that gives William Powell and Hedy Lamar a chance to clinch at random, and everyone a chance to act at will could hardly be anything but fun for those on the Hollywood side of the screen. From this side, however, the effect is thoroughly confusing.

It all has something to do with William Powell's rising from the oblivion of permanent amnesia to become a high-ranking French diplomat. And then there's an attempt to prove that in his preamnesia days he was a murderer and a rat who even double-crossed his partners in crime, and sometimes you get the idea that he really was this mythical other man, and all the time you hope it turns out that he was, just to see what the rules say about punishing Dr. Jekyll for something Mr. Hyde did. But either being thoroughly stumped or just plain having too much fun to follow the problem through, Hollywood spurns a last chance to be original and tacks on one of its favorite hail-hail-the-gang's-all-here endings. According to the pattern, the whole preceding thread of emphasis is thrown out and a complete tangle of underrated detail suddenly falls together with breath-taking rapidity that is a let-down to everyone but master-mind Powell, sufferer Lamar, and a fatherly French foreign minister.

Except for the last scene, where he gets a chance to pull a bit of thin man flippancy, Powell is blithely miscast. The picture itself might well have been directed by three different men with three different interpretations of its content, and written by at least as many more confused individuals. It takes what could have been an interesting if not too plausible psychological problem, and then leaves it daugling in mid-air. All of this ends in the fatal error of misleading the audience without letting them know they're being misled, and the net result is Hollywood at its most chaotic. For sheer inconsistency of character, plot, and theme, "Crossroads" will be a tough one to beat.