The hook: "Random film of the day" served up Mirage (1965) — a black-and-white thriller with Gregory Peck, Walter Matthau as a private detective, and director Edward Dmytryk. Modest ratings, fame below ground level: even hardened cinephiles in discussion threads honestly admit they kept the source novel on their shelf for years without suspecting a film had been made from it. But dig into the credits and the film stops being just "a forgotten sixties noir." Three lines in its biography form a dizzying figure: the source novel was written by a man who served time for refusing to name names to the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC); the film was directed by one of the "Hollywood Ten" who did name names; and the picture itself is about a scientist who voluntarily burned his own memory to preserve his principles. That is, a film about amnesia as a survival tool was made by people who lived through an era when forgetting was a state technology. A story on three levels, and none of them are far-fetched.
Investigation:
The plot of Mirage looks standard for the genre at first glance: after a blackout in a Manhattan skyscraper, accountant David Stillwell (Peck) steps outside and discovers the world doesn't match his memory. In the building where he "works," his office doesn't exist. A strange woman recognizes him on sight. The police ask basic questions — and Stillwell realizes with horror that he doesn't remember his own date of birth. A psychiatrist throws him out: this kind of amnesia doesn't exist. Turns out it does — but not as a disease, as a decision. In the finale it's revealed: Stillwell is not an accountant but a physical chemist who made a discovery capable of neutralizing the effects of nuclear explosion. The formula is wanted by those who see it as a weapon. And so the hero makes the only move available to an honest man against the machine — burns his own manuscript and locks the memory of what happened behind trauma: a witness to a fall from a window that he couldn't prevent. Memory is the last safe, and he swallows the key himself.
Now overlay the creators' biographies on this plot — and you'll get a different kind of chills.
The source — the novel Fallen Angel, 1952. The title page credited Walter Ericson; behind the pseudonym was Howard Fast — one of the most published American prose writers of the century, author of Spartacus, the one Kubrick filmed with Kirk Douglas. Fast's biography reads like a spy novel, except without the fiction. In 1950 he's summoned to HUAC — the House Committee on Un-American Activities, the main instrument of witch-hunting in the McCarthy era. Simple question: name the sponsors of the fund helping orphans of veterans who fought on the Republican side in Spain. Among the sponsors, as later emerged, was Eleanor Roosevelt. Fast refuses — and gets three months in federal prison for "contempt of Congress."
He served at Mill Point, West Virginia — an institution with a unique reputation: by 1944, 85 percent of its inhabitants were conscientious objectors, not criminals. Right there, on the bunk, Fast began writing Spartacus — a novel about a slave rebellion, people who had everything taken from them, including their names. After publication he was blacklisted by all major publishers, and he released Spartacus himself through his own little Blue Heron Press: 50,000 copies, 48,000 sold, seven reprints in four months. The press couldn't understand — how do you write a bestseller about freedom behind barbed wire. Fast later explained without any poetry: for a committed person, a place of confinement doesn't interfere, he was already living in the prison of the era.
But back to Fallen Angel. From Fast's own memoirs (Being Red, 1990) a detail emerges worthy of its own novel. He took the novel to Little, Brown under a pseudonym — rightly assuming that a Marxist would soon stop getting published at all. Someone among the "patriotically minded" employees informed the FBI, and then the unimaginable happened: J. Edgar Hoover himself called the publishing house's CEO with a message whose essence boiled down to the mocking logic of the era — publishing Fast under his real name was fine and necessary, but under a pseudonym — absolutely not. The book was already printed and bound; the dust jacket was hastily redone, announcing "Ericson" as Fast's new pseudonym for detective fiction. In 1953, incidentally, Fast received the Stalin Peace Prize, and after the 20th Party Congress and Hungary-1956, he publicly broke with the party and wrote his confessional The Naked God (1957) — a book where he called his party past a betrayal of humanity. A man whose biography tore like film into two incompatible editing strips wrote a novel about a man torn between two of his own lives. Coincidence? In the genre of Mirage there are no such coincidences.
And now the second half of this two-headed construction. The film was directed by Edward Dmytryk — a man with perhaps the heaviest moral weight in postwar Hollywood history. In 1947 he entered the "Hollywood Ten" — a group of filmmakers who refused to answer HUAC on principled grounds. Prison, dismissal from RKO, flight to England, passport expired — returned, arrest, four months and seventeen days in that same Mill Point prison where Fast would end up a year or two later. One camp for two, a couple years apart.
Then their paths diverged like two versions of the same experiment. In April 1951, Dmytryk appeared before the Committee a second time — and answered all questions. Named names: seven directors and another dozen and a half people, including Arnold Manoff, whose careers were destroyed for years afterwards. He explained his decision by the Alger Hiss case, the Korean War, and disillusionment with the party — essentially the same set of arguments as Fast, only made seven years earlier and with the opposite sign. Dmytryk's career was restored by independent producer Stanley Kramer: The Caine Mutiny (1954) became the second-highest-grossing film of the year and returned the director to the first rank. Fast didn't name names — and lost a decade. Dmytryk named them — and lost, by his own admission, all his old friends.
And then in 1965 these two met in one film. Fast — the novel's author, Dmytryk — the director of the adaptation. The screenplay was written by Peter Stone, fresh off the triumph of Charade with Cary Grant — and ironically it was Stone who rewrote the novel's ending in Hollywood style: in Fast's version the hero burns the formula for the sake of abstraction, in Stone's there's added specificity, Quincy Jones music, and a tragic leap from a window. Which of the two to consider the moral center of this meeting is a question without an answer, and that's its beauty. We don't need to be judges; it's enough to note that a film about the right to erase one's own memory was made by two people whom the era forced to choose between memory and survival — and each chose differently.
The finale closed the circle already beyond the screen. Universal, according to the American Film Institute (AFI) catalog, indicated in the credits the source as "a story based on the novel by Walter Ericson" — without Fast and without the novel's title. In June 1965, Fast sued the studio: the agreement supposedly stipulated his real name would appear on screen, he demanded $25,000 and a ban on distribution. How the case ended — public sources are silent, which is symptomatic in itself: a little man's lawsuit against a studio giant didn't even leave a trace in the chronicles. But justice, as is its way, intervened indirectly: when the remake-sequel Jigsaw came out in 1968, Fast was credited honestly — as the source author. And a few years later another print run of the novel came out under his real name. The pseudonym "Ericson" quietly died — the last character in this story to dissolve without a trace.
A separate touch too good not to mention: the film's music was written by 32-year-old Quincy Jones — this was one of his first feature-length works right after Sidney Lumet's The Pawnbroker, the starting point of his journey to Michael Jackson's Thriller. A man who went through black-and-white Cold War noir to the best-selling album in music history. Sixties Hollywood knew how to gather random constellations into one project that you couldn't mistake for anything else.
Sources: Wikipedia (Mirage 1965, Howard Fast, Edward Dmytryk, Quincy Jones), AFI Catalog of Feature Films (complete production biography of the film, including Fast's lawsuit against Universal), memoir tradition — Fast's Being Red as recounted by Trussel.com publications, writer Francis M. Nevins's investigation on MysteryFile.com (the story of Hoover's call and the novel's fate between editions), Bloody Murder blog (parallel publication of novel and film), The Magnificent 60s blog (analysis of the theme of conscience and "compromise" in Dmytryk's directing), The Inter-Mountain archive about Mill Point prison.
Conclusions:
What grabs me most powerfully in this story is its genre inversion. Mirage is a film about a man who voluntarily makes himself an empty space to save one formula from evil. And behind the scenes remains the documentary history of two real people whom the system forced to solve the same problem — and they solved it oppositely, both survived and both managed to meet in one project. The screenplay rests on three pillars: amnesia as choice, name as sentence, forgetting as survival tactic. And each of these pillars has documentary confirmation in the authors' biographies.
There's a second, sadder moral in this. Mirage flopped at the box office — probably because black-and-white noir gloom sold poorly in the era of color's flourishing. But look deeper and the failure is logical: the film hurt too honestly about something to be just entertainment. The conscience of a hero who refused to burn his own principles — that's Fast's biography, told by his hands but filmed by the hands of a man who for the same reasons broke and agreed to play by the system's rules. A spectacle about dissent staged by a man who assented. And so you get the most honest thriller of the sixties — one in which both sides of the barricade are felt in every frame, because both sides were in the room.
And — a small note in closing. The film's credits didn't mention Fast. The lawsuit didn't fix this. Modern databases fixed it. The story we've told is pure git blame: commits in place, author restored, system working. Just slower than we'd like.