It certainly does, and yet that's part of the charm of this incredible (in both senses) film. One wonders how Charles "Blackie" O'Neal went from writing Val Lewton's masterpiece "The Seventh Victim" (also about a secret society hounding someone to suicide) to penning something this utterly silly and unbelievable. It's all too reminiscent of "The Maltese Falcon" the San Francisco setting, the use of an historical secret society for the MacGuffin, even a mysterious villain known as "Mr. G." in ways that only remind one of how much better "Falcon" was as a story and a film. But the cast is excellent (though as usual with these productions. Barton Yarborough's "comic" relief gets trying at times, Jim Bannon is a capable hero and George Macready and Nina Foch show their worthiness for the bigger and better roles they got later), the production values good and the overall atmosphere better than I'd expect from a hack director like Henry Levin. It's one of those movies that throws so many movie clichés at you in such a willy-nilly fashion that in the end it attains a sort of accidental surrealism and (here's why I marked the "spoiler" button) it contains a visualized flashback narrated by a character who turns out to be lying five years before Alfred Hitchcock supposedly innovated that in "Stage Fright."
Review of I Love a Mystery
