The story of a US major kidnapped in May, 1944, by the Germans who try to trick him into believing that he has amnesia, the war is over, the Allies won, and -- by the way, where and when will the D-Day landings take place? The Germans have set up a fake hospital staffed by phony Americans and they rush the unconscious Major Pike (James Garner) there. He is attended by Rod Taylor, a real doctor but wearing an American uniform, and Eva Marie Saint, his fake nurse and wife, who has been chosen for the deception from among the inmates of Ravensbruck.

The Germans have been very thorough. Alles in Ordnung. And they convince Garner for a day or two that the concocted story is true. Garner is sufficiently convinced that he spills the beans about the invasion. But he becomes suspicious and for some time exists in two zones, Schrödinger's major. When he finally twigs to the con game, he lies and tells them that he made up the Normandy story. Thereafter, it gets kind of complicated.

It's structured like a three-act play. Act I. We see Garner in his habitat in England, going over the invasion plans with other officers. He is told he must meet his contact in Lisbon. He incurs an important paper cut while handling a map. Act II. The ersatz hospital where Rod Taylor explains everything for the thousandth time to the phony staff. Here we see Garner wake up and react to his "amnesia". We then see the penny drop. Act III. An anticlimax in which Garner and Saint escape to Switzerland.

It would have made a good Twilight Zone episode. As it is, Act III should have been dropped and more time spent with Garner in the hospital, getting to know the other "patients", becoming friendly with Taylor, developing some affection for Saint. I don't know what they might have filled the story out with, but it's too sketchy. Here is Garner, in this typical VA-type hospital and we only see him talking to Taylor, Saint, and an intrusive and extravagantly stupid SS officer posing as a civilian.

Garner has lost six years of his life, as far as he knows, and he simply doesn't snoop around enough for missing information. How can he wander around and not stop a pinchbeck patient at random and ask how the Sox are doing? Or whether Mammy Yokum got out of the cabbage patch? And I wish the SS officer hadn't been so obviously a pig. The guy looks like Elmer Fudd. He's manipulative, craven, obsequious, "practical" as he puts it. The SS officer is a real stereotype, too. He's fat, arrogant, and has a hang-worthy neck the width of one of the Parthenon pillars. He ends every sentence with a rhetorical, "Huh?"

The German soldiers, when they are in American uniforms, look like anybody you might stop on the street. But when the jig is up, soldiers in German uniforms take over and they are pudgy, jowly, and ugly. How retro can you get? The movie is over-directed too. Example: There's a scene in which Saint and Garner are sitting across from each other. She's knitting. Garner has become suspicious and is silently probing a bookcase looking for something -- anything -- that describes post-war events.

Saint's job is to keep an eye on him without revealing that she's doing so. Garner is supposed to be hiding his doubts. You and I -- total amateurs at the business -- could do a better job of enacting the roles. Garner is supposed to act naturally, be casual, but he's frowning as he flips through the books and his suspicions grow. Saint should be concentrating on her knitting with only an occasional flick of her glance at Garner, but she virtually stops knitting and stares goggle-eyed at Garner. It's like watching a Cecil B. DeMille movie where every nuance is shoved down your throat. Just open a little wider please.

Interesting byplay towards the end between Garner and Taylor when the Reveal has been made and Garner is about to be toted off for interrogation by the SS. What do you suppose they'll do to me? asks Garner. "Oh, they'll probably start off with something simple first. Maybe sleep deprivation. A trick they picked up from the Russians. Deprive a man of sleep and you make him fuzzy, confuse his allegiances." It makes the SS sound like St. Francis of Assisi, compared to the "enhanced interrogation" of today.

Rod Taylor's character is supposed to have been born in America and spent his first sixteen years there before coming to Germany, but he wouldn't fool me for a minute because he uses the expression "different to", a British locution, rather than the American "different from" or "different than". Eva Marie Saint wouldn't fool me either. I know a person from Newark, New Jersey, when I see one.

I've kind of made fun of some of the movie but it's not actually badly done. I was impressed the first time I saw it. What a delicious trap the Germans have set. It's pretty suspenseful in Act II and the tension is underlined in Dmitri Tiomkin's score, with its familiar crashing, dramatic chords and its clanging bells. Worth catching.