Street of Chance (1942)

Debris from construction on a nearby building falls and strikes Frank Thompson (Burgess Meredith) in the head, knocking him out cold. When he wakes up, he waves off medical treatment. However, once he gives his statement to a beat cop, he realizes that something is terribly wrong. Someone else’s initials are inside the brim of his fedora and on his cigarette case. He goes home and finds the apartment he shared with his wife is vacant. The landlord tells him that she moved out a year ago. Frank is puzzled since, as far he he knows, he’d just said goodbye to her at their door that morning.

Thankfully, Frank is reunited with his wife, Virginia (Louise Platt.) He gets his old job back. Everything seems to be getting back to normal when Frank finds a man waiting outside his office. The man chases him to a taxi after work. Who is he? What does he want? Frank can’t remember but he senses something is wrong. When the man appears at his house in the middle of the night, Frank convinces Virginia to travel to her mother’s house. He’s going to try and piece together his missing memory.

Street of Chance‘s plot might sound like the basis for an episode of The Twilight Zone but it’s film noir through and through. Frank is a victim of circumstance and finds himself knee deep in a criminal investigation where he is the main suspect. I won’t spoil any more of the plot. Sadly, though, the premise sounds better than the film turns out to be. If one were to remove the amnesia aspect of the story, it would be a fairly pedestrian crime drama.

Seeing a young Burgess Meredith as a leading man gives Street of Chance a curio quality that elevates it above similarly-themed fare. Meredith is quite good at portraying the confused Frank. He and his female co-leads — Louise Platt and Claire Trevor — have the thankless job of playing along with some of the rather abrupt right angles the script takes to get where it’s going. But, even with the unique set-up, predicting the eventual outcome wasn’t difficult.

Fans of film noir and 1940s crime drama will find most of the tropes they enjoy are present and accounted for in Street of Chance. Those new to the genre should start with better examples, like Double Indemnity or The Big Sleep.