From reading "Undaunted Courage" by Stephen Ambrose, I was acquainted with the suspicious "suicide" of the famous explorer Meriwether Lewis at a Tennessee "tavern." "Mysterious Circumstances" is an exploration of alternative versions of what might have happened, filmed with considerable attention to authenticity in locale and the era. Many historians have accepted the "suicide" version, but Lewis was traveling on a notoriously dangerous trail, and shooting oneself twice and then cutting oneself "from head to foot with a razor" is a suspicious "suicide," to say the least. The various accounts of the same event are evocative of Akira Kurosawa's approach to storytelling in "Rashomon" (1950), the one flaw being that the versions here are not clearly accounts by different witnesses to the same events but are perhaps rooted in later speculation by those who found the accepted version singularly bizarre. The first version depicted in this movie seems to be close to the version that prevailed, essentially by default. And it is, indeed, played as singularly bizarre. Two previous reviewers (action addicts, no doubt) rated this movie 1 star; 11 other previous reviewers rated it 9 or 10 stars. No way does this average 4.8. My quick calculation makes it about 7.6. This film is worth watching if you have more than a juvenile attention span and are intrigued by mystery.
