Strange Mr. Gregory
Directed by Phil RosenMr. Gregory (Edmund Lowe) is a stage mentalist with an unsettling gift for psychological manipulation. When he becomes obsessed with Ellen Randall (Jean Rogers), a married woman who rebuffs his attentions, he engineers a scheme that requires him to disappear entirely – to die, in effect, so that he may reappear as someone else. Ellen's husband John (Donald Douglas) stands between Gregory and the object of his fixation, and it is around John that the film's central danger begins to coil.
Gregory resurfaces under the identity of Lane Talbot, insinuating himself into Ellen's world with the patience of a man who has already calculated every variable. When John Randall turns up dead, suspicion moves through the household like weather, touching the butler Riker (Frank Reicher), the scheming Sheila Edwards (Marjorie Hoshelle), and eventually Ellen herself. A courtroom proceeding brings Defense Attorney Blair (Jonathan Hale) and the District Attorney (Robert Emmett Keane) into confrontation over a case built on circumstance and concealed identity.
Strange Mr. Gregory works within the Monogram B-picture tradition while drawing on the stage-illusionist figure that noir occasionally favored as a vehicle for exploring control, deception, and the performance of selfhood. The film's modest budget does not prevent it from engaging questions about obsession and the elasticity of identity that would occupy more celebrated noir productions throughout the decade.
