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For a movie where basically everybody is trying either to deceive or kill the main character, Mirage (1965) is pretty dull. In this Edward Dmytryk thriller, Gregory Peck plays David, a cost accountant who, after the film opens, starts to wonder with every interaction if he might have a bad — and unusual — case of amnesia that seems to have crept up on him. The typical hallmarks are here. He can’t remember his address; he couldn’t even guess his birthday. But some weirder touches set his case apart. Most memories are intact as long as they aren’t any older than two years. He keeps having visions of a guy falling to his death from a quite high height, and from a vantage point discomfitingly making it seem like, even if he wasn’t directly responsible, he was at least at the scene of the crime. And men keep popping up in suits suggesting David was involved in something nefarious. Sometimes they point guns at him and make threats. 

David doesn’t know what to do — the police don’t know what to make of his incomprehensible attempts at an explanation — so he enlists a droll private detective named Ted (a great Walter Matthau) to hold his hand while he wades through the muck. Ted is inexperienced in the investigating game (it’s his first case) but clearly seasoned in bemused frown-giving. A woman named Shela (Diane Baker) also enters the story; she and David seem to have some history. But because she has a habit of running away when David asks questions she doesn’t like, it seems like she’s aligned in some way with those aforementioned threatening men in suits. Everybody is seemingly part of an organization that, as a misplaced keychain insinuates, is convinced “the future is here” and needs to see it through. 

It takes so long to get any answers in Mirage that you wouldn’t be wrong to have lost interest in getting them once the secrets-revealed stage comes. (David still mostly has no idea what’s going on until the last 20-ish minutes of the movie.) The dialogue in spurts suggests Mirage wants to be a comedy thriller á la the popular Charade (1963), but ultimately the movie’s blandness wins out, further deadened by a flat televisual look that countervails any tingle of excitement. Though the initial scenes of David’s frightened confusion pique our interest, what comes after lacks proportionate tension. Dmytryk doesn’t so much build urgency as lend twists as much extra padding as possible to extend the running time, as if there was a fear the film would somehow have less legitimacy if it wore a sense of narrative economy as proudly as a lower-budgeted B movie. It’s an 80-minute thriller trapped in a nearly two-hour-long movie’s body, increasingly wearing itself out trying to break free.