The title of Irving Reis' Crack-Up sums up two elements of its plot: the wreck of a train carrying Pat O'Brien and the psychotic episode he throws in its aftermath. He gives lectures at a New York museum, demystifying art for the masses, who obligingly moan reverently at Monet but hoot derisively at Dali. When a phone call (sick mother) summons him upstate, he boards a train on which he freezes like a deer in the headlamp of a renegade engine hurtling straight at him. Oddly, he survives, but upon his return hurls a fire extinguisher through the gallery doors, assaults a policeman, and babbles incoherently about the accident. Trouble is, Mom's in fine fettle, and there was no crash.
The movie joins him in sorting out the dramatic turns his life has taken. Helping him is Claire Trevor, a fixture in Manhattan art-snob circles. Herbert Marshall purports to help, too, but he keeps his cards close to his vest. Quite candidly not much help are the museum's board and its snooty benefactors, among them Ray Collins, who were never keen about the democratic spirit O'Brien breathed into their mausoleum and use his erratic behavior to halt his series of light-hearted talks. The police, too, have a stake; O'Brien did, after all, throw that punch....
One of the felicities of Crack-Up is that it takes its canvases seriously, putting them at the core of the story. (A similar respect for art, music and theater, and for audiences assumed to have some acquaintance with them, routinely elevated films of the 1940s; times, plainly, have changed.) Of course monetary rather than esthetic value drives the villains here, as O'Brien slowly uncovers an international art scam, which is why he was derailed in the first place.
The train crash itself a very scary sequence, brilliantly handled by Reis emerges, in the final wrapping-up, as the weakest point of the movie, a baroque twist too far-fetched to convince. Because of this contrivance, the movie cleaves to the over-plotted mysteries of the 1930s and early 1940s rather than to the emergent noir cycle that, in its look and many of its devices, it otherwise resembles. But then there's the always toothsome Claire Trevor, whose ensembles take inspiration from the uniforms of the just-won war; festooned in military braid and berets, she tilts the scales towards noir. Either way, Crack-Up offers some suspenseful fun spiked with a surprising note of sophistication.
