Strange Impersonation (1946)

Strange Impersonation (1946) is a female scientist romance and love rivalry and disfigurement and hallucinogenic psychological fantasy jealousy and blackmail film noir plastic surgery melodrama by Anthony Mann and starring Ruth Ford, Hillary Brooke and William Gargan, all of whom combine to produce a block rocking cheapo fantasy film noir narrative of the first water, making it a film more of classic noir than many a classic film noir, and although this remains thematically and even stylistically classic, the overcoat of fantastic doom and femme fatality and the all important subject of identity, make of Strange Impersonation (1946) a classic of its medium and style, and a classic of its meta-narrational type, exploring the popular idiom and thinking of its day, as it does.

Anthony Mann’s super class act, here it is for ya,  Strange Impersonation (1946) exists in the murky peripheries of cinema’s consciousness, a film neither wholly forgotten nor ever properly enshrined. Republic Pictures, a studio long associated with rugged matinee serials and low-budget Westerns, was never meant to house something this unstable, this volatile. 

And yet, the picture exists — a strange brew of identity crises, medical experimentation, cosmetic deceit, and mid-century misogyny. It is a film made during a year when America was trying to recall its sense of self, as surely as its heroine tries to erase her face and history. 

It is compact, quick, and disconcertingly neat — 68 minutes of unraveling nightmares and scorched egos. If the ending dissolves into something easier than what preceded it, that only enhances its peculiar place in the postwar cinematic imagination.

Nominally a tale of science, ambition, and betrayal, Strange Impersonation (1946) quickly reveals its true interest lies elsewhere. Its scientific frame is just that — a frame — from which Mann hangs his first serious study in identity distortion, a theme he would deepen in his later, superior works. The film opens in the antiseptic confines of a laboratory, the Mindred Lord Institute, with its cold white walls and allusions to benevolent progress. 

But what emerges from this setting is not order or clarity, but dissolution. Here, Brenda Marshall plays Dr. Nora Goodrich, a chemist researching a new anesthetic that she declares will “revolutionize medicine.” Naturally, she tests it on herself. Naturally, it fails. Or rather, it is sabotaged.

In one of the film’s more overt narrative thrusts, Nora’s assistant Arline, played with frostbitten elegance by Hillary Brooke, manipulates the chemicals during the experiment, causing an explosion that leaves Nora’s face badly burned. 

Courting a female scientist in 1946 in Strange Impersonation (1946)

Brooke’s Arline is a colleague in name only — in action, she is a usurper, eager to steal both Nora’s place in the lab and in the affections of Nora’s fiancé, Dr. Stephen Lindstrom, played with wooden amiability by William Gargan. 

Proof of noir in Strange Impersonation (1946)

The sabotage is precise, intimate, and feminine. A beaker tips. Fire erupts. A face is destroyed. What follows is less a thriller than a waking dream: plastic surgery, assumed identities, a body that may or may not be dead, and finally, a courtroom melodrama that is resolved by a narrative pivot so extreme it risks collapsing the entire structure.

To call this a noir is to stretch the term until it nearly snaps — and yet it belongs there, perhaps more comfortably than many of the genre’s more muscular entries. 

The shadows may be lacking, the streets less rain-soaked, but the central obsessions are all present: duplicity, fatalism, sexual distrust, urban alienation, and the impossibility of returning to what one once was. There is a woman with a past. 

There is a woman with a new face. There is a woman who may not be a woman at all, but a condition, a warning. This is noir not in its lighting but in its logic. And the logic is this: you cannot escape who you are.

That fatalistic dictum, spoken by the plastic surgeon played by H. B. Warner, marks the psychological fulcrum of the piece. Warner’s character is a kind of ghostly arbiter, a surgeon who traffics in reshaped appearances but warns against metaphysical escape. Beneath the scalpel lies not freedom, but further entrapment. If noir traditionally traffics in men losing control — of women, of morality, of themselves — Strange Impersonation (1946) offers the inverse: a woman attempting total control, and being punished for it.

Brenda Marshall, remembered more for being the wife of William Holden than for any long-lasting career on screen, gives a performance that is chilly, mannered, and finally rather touching. Her Nora is not a victim so much as a case study. 

he embodies the postwar dilemma of the professional woman: allowed to contribute, expected to recede. Her ambitions are penalized. Her intellect is framed as hubristic. She is allowed to be brilliant only so long as she does not inconvenience a man. 

Dans le film noir, l'histoire et le rêve sont indiscernables — Strange Impersonation (1946)

When she delays her wedding in order to complete her anesthetic research, it triggers the entire collapse of her life. Her lab is destroyed, her face burned, her fiancé stolen, and her credibility erased. The message is unmistakable, even as it hides behind genre trappings: female independence must be punished, then made palatable again.

The year 1946 was pivotal in American cultural life. The war was over, the men were returning, and the women were being told — subtly and otherwise — to step aside. Rosie the Riveter had done her job. It was time for the kitchen again. 

In this context, Strange Impersonation (1946) can be read as a cultural corrective, an allegory about what happens to women who seek power outside domestic spheres. The narrative arc is reactionary: Nora’s attempt to assert scientific control over her body and her work is met with trauma, disfigurement, and criminal suspicion.

Hell hath no fury as a woman scalded by acid.

THE MOST UNUSUAL PICTURE IN YEARS! (original poster-all caps)

DEATH and a BATTLE of the SEXES! 

 Only by returning — literally — to a softer, more familiar version of herself can she escape punishment. That she must be “reborn” through plastic surgery to do so only sharpens the point. Science is not her friend. It is the site of her damnation.

Hillary Brooke, who would later be remembered mostly for her comedic work on The Abbott and Costello Show, delivers a performance of unusual complexity. Her Arline is all sugar and poison. Tall, glamorous, and whisper-voiced, Brooke plays betrayal not as a rupture but as a smirk. 

Viewers familiar with her as a benign comic figure may be startled by the malice she radiates here. Her character’s villainy is not grand but granular: small lies, withheld letters, secret manipulations. She is not merely jealous of Nora. She is envious of the very space Nora occupies in the world — as a scientist, as a woman of accomplishment, as a person desired. Arline does not want to be Nora. She wants Nora to vanish.

This intimate cruelty situates Strange Impersonation (1946) within the realm of what one might call "female noir" — narratives structured not around hardboiled men and molls, but around women's relational violence. 

The stakes are not global; they are intensely personal. The warfare is not conducted with guns but with secrets, whispers, social slights. The rivalries are dressed in gowns. It is here, perhaps, that the film offers its clearest feminist reading, even if unintentionally. The film is driven by women: Marshall, Brooke, and Ruth Ford, who appears briefly but memorably as a blackmailing drifter. 

The men are placeholders. William Gargan's fiancé figure is a soporific cipher, a man around whom the women spiral, but who offers little gravity of his own. He is neither seductive nor sinister. His presence in the story is structural, not emotional.

That this man is fought over so ferociously — quite literally changing faces for — is perhaps the most absurd part of the film. Gargan, remembered for a long string of modest supporting roles and for playing Martin Kane on television, lacks the heat required for such narrative centrality. 

His inclusion weakens the romantic stakes but heightens the film’s inadvertent absurdity, suggesting that it is not really the man that is being fought over, but the idea of winning. The real contest here is not for affection but for position.

And yet, despite its modest budget and theatrical limitations, Mann’s direction suggests more than the material can sustain. There are moments — especially in the dreamlike sequences following the surgery — when his camera finds angles that feel dislocated, uncanny. The use of mirrors, for instance, offers more than mere reflection. 

These mirrors fracture identity, signal duplicity, and gesture toward the psychological instability that defines the film’s final third. One moment in particular — Marshall’s post-surgical reveal — hints at what Mann would later accomplish more fully in Raw Deal (1948) and T-Men (1947). The shadows fall thicker there. The moral compromises are deeper. But Strange Impersonation (1946) marks the beginning of that journey.

The narrative, built on a nesting doll structure of deception, identity switch, and assumed reality, bears obvious resemblance to other noir and noir-adjacent films. The DNA of Dark Passage (1947) is already present: a scarred protagonist, facial reconstruction, a hunted identity. 

Likewise, No Man of Her Own (1950) echoes in the central conceit of a woman living under someone else’s name. And yet, Strange Impersonation (1946) distinguishes itself through its sheer female saturation. This is not a noir where the woman is an accessory to a man’s moral decay. This is a noir where the woman is both the agent and the object of the fall.

What prevents the film from reaching canonical status within noir is not its thematic material, but its refusal of style. Republic Pictures was not a studio designed for visual boldness. Its sets are flat, its interiors overlit, its furniture staid. 

The film lacks the chiaroscuro that gives noir its visual force. It has the story of noir, the logic of noir, but not the look. One could say it is a noir without shadows. Or perhaps: a noir lit by fluorescents.

Nevertheless, Mann injects moments of cinematic tension that hint at what he would soon master. The climactic interrogation scene, for instance, makes full use of Dutch angles, constrained frames, and harsh lighting to evoke psychological collapse. 

This is where the film most fully embraces its noir core — a woman on the brink, accused of her own murder, silenced by another woman’s refusal to speak. Here, the film teeters on the edge of genuine despair.

And then, suddenly, it doesn't. The twist, long telegraphed in hindsight but still abrupt, reveals that the entire narrative was a dream — or rather, a hallucination induced by the anaesthetic. The disfigurement, the surgery, the murder, the trial: none of it happened. 

Nora wakes up. All is well. The fiancé is loving, the assistant smiling. Nothing is wrong. It is a narrative sleight-of-hand that serves as both cop-out and critique. It erases the entire structure of noir fatalism, replacing it with reassurance. The postwar audience is released from its anxieties. The professional woman has dreamed her punishment. Now she can choose marriage and safety. The danger is dismissed as projection. The nightmare has an off switch.

Such an ending might infuriate a modern viewer, but in its own time, it spoke to a nation eager to believe in resets. The war had ended. The dead were buried. The wounds were healing. Why not believe that ruin was just a dream?

Female face off and identity with Hillary Brooke and Ruth Ford in Strange Impersonation (1946)

Still, the performance of Brenda Marshall deserves to be salvaged from this narrative capitulation. Her Nora is cerebral but not cold, ambitious but not ruthless. She is undone not by her flaws but by the social structures around her. 

Her sin is self-reliance. Her punishment is narrative collapse. That she plays both victim and manipulator with such restraint is a credit to her unflashy talent. Sadly, she would soon leave film altogether, her legacy eclipsed by her husband’s.

Hillary Brooke, by contrast, would go on to considerable fame in television, most notably opposite Lou Costello. But her performance here is a reminder of her range. She is terrifying not through violence, but through civility. Her smiles are death masks.

Strange Impersonation (1946)

Ruth Ford, who plays the blackmailing Jane Karaski, is another formidable presence, even in her brief screen time. Married to noir regular Zachary Scott and later a patron of the literary avant-garde, Ford brings to the film a note of class disintegration. Her Karaski is a woman on the edge — desperate, unstable, and a moral accelerant to the story’s implosion.

William Gargan’s contribution remains the film’s weakest link. He lacks the charisma necessary to make the romantic stakes believable. That so many plot convolutions revolve around him is a failure of casting, not intention. One imagines a Richard Carlson or Zachary Scott in the role and mourns what could have been.

The supporting cast includes H.B. Warner, whose prior turn as Christ in DeMille’s The King of Kings (1927) adds a strange patina to his role here as the surgeon playing god. George Chandler and Lyle Talbot also appear in bit parts, their familiarity lending weight to scenes that might otherwise float into irrelevance.

In the broader history of American cinema, Strange Impersonation (1946) occupies a curious place. It is a film about forgetting that cannot be forgotten. It offers a cultural map of postwar female anxiety, cloaked in genre convention.

It suggests that the nation, like its heroine, would prefer to wake up and discover it had all been a mistake — the scars, the crimes, the betrayals. But such clean exits rarely hold. The dream may end, but its meanings remain.

And in the final estimation, this strange little film — compact, breathless, tonally unstable — remains a testament to noir’s capaciousness. Even in the fluorescent light of a Republic backlot, noir survives. In bruised ambition, in betrayal made polite, in dreams that threaten to become real.

Questions abound and arise, with the fascinating inclusion of the word TELEVISION which appears on the title card. Hard to find out about this. 

Strange Impersonation (1946)

Directed by Anthony Mann

Genres - Crime, Drama, Romance, Thriller  |   Sub-Genres - Film Noir  |   Release Date - Jan 16, 1946  |   Run Time - 68 min.  |