"The Man in the Road" is a British film from 1956 based on the novel of the same name. It concerns a famous scientist who is kidnapped while driving and taken to a country nursing home.
***SPOILERS*** Mildly interesting British spy movie about a man found fully clothes, that look like he got them just out the dry cleaners,who appears to be lost to the world. The man later identified as Ivan Mason,Derek "Far from home" Farr, is later found out to be top British scientist Dr James Paxton, who discovered a new formula for "Chicken Kiev" that's just out of this world and if put on the market can bankrupt the Soviet Union's economy!
Derek Farr is ambushed on a road,drugged and told by sinister doctor Donald Woolfit that his memory has gone and that he is someone else.Its a dastardly commie plot to take him to Moscow.
I watched this shortly after I had watched another short film from Milton, although not deliberately. The previous short had been interesting but unsuccessful in bringing out its point and this film is pretty much the same albeit in a different way.
This is quite a sophisticated British crime thriller with an on form Donald Wolfitt as a scheming doctor ostensibly caring for the injured Derek Farr at a country clinic. Farr is good and determined as ("Mason") who has been in a road accident and is suffering from amnesia, but as he slowly recovers he begins to doubt the story that he is being told - and decides to investigate.
As a mystery thriller the intrigue is not bad but rather fantastic and incredible, a little bit too overdone in complexity to be convincing, but the Russians actually worked along such lines in the cold war, using all kinds of brainwash techniques including hypnosis. It's all about hypnosis here, the victim wakes up without a memory and is more or less coerced into accepting an alien half Russian identity which he is sure isn't his real one, but he can't find his real one, because his brains have been tampered with.
An all-star cast (in Britain, at least) does its darndest to keep this talky adaptation of a popular novel afloat. A man awakes to find he cannot remember who he is.
The plot idea is very good for "Man in the Road" but the concept was done much better a decade later in the form of "36 Hours"--and I strongly recommend you see this James Garner movie first. However, if you can allow for some plot problems here and there, "Man in the Road" is still well worth seeing.
After an introductory scene in which a car is waylaid on a narrow English country lane, a corpse substituted for the driver and the car doused with gasoline and set on fire, a man (Derek Farr) wakes up in a private hospital.His amiable but vaguely sinister attending physician, Prof.
