A weak Hollywood remake of the 1938 psychological French thriller Carrefour, that’s about amnesia and blackmail presented in a much too light manner for this sort of a suspense tale to carry much weight. It’s based on the original story by John Kafka and Howard Emmett Rogers and written with a certain smugness that goodness prevails over evil by Guy Trosper. High school dropout director Jack Conway (“Libeled Lady”/”A Tale of Two Cities”/”Boom Town”) shows his usual technical skills as a craftsman to turn out this glossy star-studded MGM studio pic that is letdown by its unconvincing story. It teams the 50-year-old William Powell as the hubby of the 29-year-old Hedy Lamarr, and asks us not even to blink.

In Paris in 1935, respected and trusted rising French diplomat David Talbot (William Powell), rumored to be in line for the coveted position of the French ambassadorship in Brazil, and his knockout classy wife of three months Lucienne (Hedy Lamarr), are cuddling at home when David receives an unsigned letter addressing him as Jean Pelletier and insisting that he pay his debt of one million francs by throwing the money over a yard fence in order for his criminal past of a robber and a murderer be kept a secret from the authorities. David confides to his wife he doesn’t know what this is about and informs the police, who set a trap for the blackmailer and arrest a party named Carlos Le Duc (Vladimir Sokoloff). He goes to trial and claims that David is really the master criminal Jean Pelletier, someone he knew from 1919 to 1922 who owes him robbery loot and is hiding his real identity by bluffing amnesia. But Dr. André Tessier (Felix Bressart) testifies that 13 years ago David was in a train wreck in France and afterwards because of a brain injury developed amnesia and could remember nothing prior to 1922.