Street of Chance

One in a relatively small group of “amnesia noir” films, Jack Hively’s Street of Chance is unmistakably from the pen of Cornell Woolrich, whose fiction inspired more noir films than any other author and whose themes spanned doomed romance, class conflict, and alienation in all its forms. Woolrich was particularly talented at revealing the evil that often exists in tranquil domesticity, as it exists here in the upper-class Diedrich (“Died Rich”?) household. Burgess Meredith plays Frank Thompson, a likable Rip Van Winkle figure who wakes up in the middle of the street with no memory of the past year of his life, and Claire Trevor plays Ruth Dillon, a servant girl who works for the family of a man whose recent murder Frank is soon accused of. The studio set streetscapes are a quaint reminder that this is a very early noir, but Hively fortunately manages to avoid the comedic touches that weaken so many early and proto-noir crime films. Frank’s discovery of the mute, disabled grandmother in the dark back room is genuinely frightening until we discover that she may be the key to saving his skin.