Jeffrey Hunter

(On Cable TV, September 2022) As much fun as it would have been to find that the 1983 proto-cyberpunk film Brainstorm could have been a remake of a 1960s thriller, this earlier Brainstorm is something very different: a cheap-and-fast neo-noir thriller featuring a scientist killing his lover’s husband and faking insanity to avoid punishment. The “neo” part of noir here is strictly chronological, based on the idea that the classical noir era ended in 1960: otherwise, you could swear that director William Conrad’s film dates from the classic noir period in how it apes the thematic, cinematic and stylistic characteristics of earlier genre examples. Only the setting is slightly off brand, more focused on corporate shenanigans and brainy characters. It brings a little something fun and interesting, even though Jeffrey Hunter is not exactly the most convincing intellectual. Anne Francis is more interesting as the femme fatale manipulating the hero into killing her abusive husband. Plot-wise, Brainstorm (shot in widescreen black-and-white at a time where such things were increasingly uncommon for potboilers) relentlessly drives toward an ending in which there is no escape, further reinforcing its belonging to the noir genre. It’s not quite a great noir (being too long at 105 minutes, for one thing) but it’s unquestionably one, and if you’re willing to be flexible on that 1960 frontier, it may even be one of the last pure-blood film noirs of the classic era, with some insanity thrown in.