UNSUNG HORRORS HORROR GIVES BACK 2026: Strange Impersonation (1946)

Each October, the Unsung Horrors podcast does a month of themed movies. This year, they will once again host a fundraiser for Best Friends, which works to save the lives of cats and dogs across America, giving pets second chances and providing them with happy homes.

Today’s theme: Doppelgangers

Nora Goodrich (Brenda Marshall) is a brilliant scientist who clearly needs a vacation. Instead of taking a spa self-care weekend, she invents an experimental, highly flammable anesthetic, tests it on herself like a madwoman, and accidentally blows half her face off when her jealous lab assistant/best friend, Arline (Hillary Brooke, The Man Who Knew Too Much), tampered with the mix.

From here, the movie violently careens into absolute brain-melting territory. Nora gets disfigured, gets ambushed by a blackmailing pedestrian, gets into a balcony brawl where the blackmailer plunges to her death and decides: “You know what? Instead of calling the cops, I am going to fake my own death, move to another city and pay a plastic surgeon to reconstruct my face… using a picture of the dead blackmailer I accidentally murdered as a reference.”

Yes, you read that right. She intentionally surgeries herself into her own blackmailer’s twin and creeps back into her ex-fiancé Dr. Stephen Lindstrom’s (William Gargan) life to successfully orchestrate the most insane of revenge schemes. It’s tight, frantic and paced like a runaway freight train, and Hillary Brooke is an absolute revelation as the backstabbing corporate snake Arline. Y

And then, with fifteen minutes left on the clock, the screenwriter remembers the Production Code exists and hits the big red “it was all a dream” button. Turns out, Nora never left the couch. She took a huff of her goofy-gas, hallucinated an entire psychological horror thriller about her best friend ruining her life, woke up completely fine and immediately decided to become a housewife. You know, she’s worth so much more than this stupid doctor. She’s a scientist. She could be a criminal supervillain! But no, we have to have crime not pay, I guess. But it seems like Arline can take care of herself.

Look, it’s film noir science fiction. Just go with whatever it wants to give you.

Director Anthony Mann went on to make Westerns including El Cid, Tin Star and Cimarron, as well as the Phillip Yordan-written (well, he put his name on it) and Aldo Ray-starring God’s Little Acre.

You can watch this on YouTube.