WasAnnon Slow pace in the most part of the movie.

ReaderKenka Let's be realistic.

Mjeteconer Just perfect...

Mandeep Tyson The acting in this movie is really good.

utgard14 French diplomat (William Powell), who suffered amnesia years before, finds himself the victim of an extortion plot. He's accused of being a former criminal who has changed his identity. As more information comes to light, it begins to appear the charges against him are true. William Powell is fine in this intriguing but flawed mystery. Hedy Lamarr plays the dutiful wife. Claire Trevor is the villainess. I wonder if the movie wouldn't have been better served by those actresses switching roles? Basil Rathbone is Trevor's partner in crime and he's enjoyable, as you might expect. It's got a lot going for it, not the least of which is the cast and that it is good-looking film overall. But there's just something missing about it. It's a little dull at times and it lacks kick. Still, with a cast like this, you shouldn't pass up giving it a shot.

Benoît A. Racine (benoit-3) I was really taken in by the premise of this film: A respectable French citizen (William Powell) married to a lovely and loving wife (Hedy Lamarr) is accused at the onset of having been a cheat in a previous incarnation before a train accident destroyed his memory and he had a chance to assume a new life and identity.Some shady characters (the always alarming Basil Rathbone and the equally ambiguous Claire Trevor) then approach him ("out of the past", in film noir fashion) in order to get back from him money he supposedly absconded with during his previous life as a devious and cowardly petty criminal. Or is it just a case of blackmailing a perfectly innocent man? What makes this storyline fascinating at first, of course, is the chance to delve in a rather profound and affecting manner into the mysteries of identity, the kind of subject that Italian playwright Luigi Pirandello had tackled spectacularly in his 1930 play "As You Desire Me", turned into a MGM blockbuster starring Greta Garbo in 1932. In that respect, the scene where the hero confronts his supposed mother (Margaret Wycherly) is especially affecting: the very fact that the woman does everything she can to deny her motherhood is all the encouragement the hero needs to imagine she really is whom she claims she isn't.The film's photography, music and editing are all sufficiently slick and atmospheric for the possibility of this version of events to stick with the viewer for a while. This makes it only more regrettable that the seemingly grafted-on happy ending and Agatha Christie-type final revelation make all this soul-searching seem ridiculous in retrospect. It might as well have been a bad dream. And the message might as well be: Don't be taken in by those fancy European dramas, fellas; life is much more simple than you think in the real (American) world.Still, the film stands out as a perfect example of what cultured, educated and potentially creative script writers can come up with when they have to model their storyline on the prevalent Hollywood trends.The "French" setting is equally devious. The actors, set designers and art directors make minimal efforts to create the illusion that the action is set in that strange, foreign Neverland called France, just enough for the viewer to assume that this is either a true story, a story of substance or at least based on a famous French novel or play, the better to disillusion everyone in the end.What most people don't know, of course, is that this film really is the remake of a French 1938 film, "Carrefour", directed by Curtis Berhardt, based on a script by German émigré writer Hans Kafka, where the hero had lost his memory during WWI. The French film was later remade in England in 1940 as "Dead Man's Shoes". The original script, loosely based on a real event in Italy in the 20's (the Bruneri-Canella case that Kafka investigated and which also inspired Pirandello's "As You Desire Me") was of course one of the main inspirations for the novel "The Wife of Martin Guerre" by American writer Janet Lewis (1941), a story set in France in the Middle Ages, which became the French film "The Return of Martin Guerre" (Daniel Vigne, 1982), which was of course remade as a Hollywood film starring Richard Gere, "Sommersby" (Jon Amiel, 1993) and set after the US Civil War. The same Italian story also inspired Edward Wool's 1935 play "Libel!" (filmed in 1959), which has several similarities with the classic film "Random Harvest" (1942). All of those various versions, adaptations and rip-offs showed, in various degrees, considerably more respect for the theme of identity and memory inherent in this inspiring premise than "Crossroads" did.

Neil Doyle WILLIAM POWELL and the gorgeous HEDY LAMARR co-star in a tale of an amnesiac who can't recall what happened to him when a train wreck wipes out part of his memory. Two very cunning crooks (BASIL RATHBONE and CLAIRE TREVOR) take advantage of him by posing as people who want to help him and then plotting to extort money from the wealthy French diplomat and his wife in order to hush up the crime they say he actually did commit.While the story itself seems far-fetched at points, it does make for an intriguing tale and it's played to the hilt by a very competent cast--although Powell as a French diplomat is a bit hard to swallow.The sinister overtones are well played by Rathbone and Trevor, both of whom always excelled at playing shady characters in films of the '40s, with Rathbone shifting from his Sherlock Holmes roles to those of the villain. They do much to give the film a flavor of film noir, as does the B&W cinematography.It's a clever tale, well directed by Jack Conway, and gives Powell and Lamarr a much better chance to emote than they would have two years later in a misguided comedy called THE HEAVENLY BODY.

David (Handlinghandel) William Powell was a charming actor but he had some bombs between the Thin Man series and "Life With Father." This surely is one of them. Hedy Lamarr was gorgeous. And the supporting cast is excellent: Felix Bressart actually imbues a cardboard character with some life. So, in a smaller role, does Margaret Wycherly. Claire Trevor does well with what she's given. Basil Rathbone, though, is stuck with the worst role and he can't bring it to life.It has a paint-by-numbers feel. It bears no relationship to any sort of reality. The characters are not well drawn and the plot is risible.Can you imagine William Powell as a French diplomat? Can you imagine William Powell as a murderer? If so, you may like this. Possibly.