D: Freddie Francis. S/P: Jimmy Sangster.Cast: Robert Webber, Anthony Newlands, Jennifer Jayne, Maurice Denham. US dist (DVD): Warner Archive Collection.

Memory loss has been a reliable thriller trope for a good many years, and is front and centre in Freddie Francis’s Hysteria, one of Hammer’s more obscure psychological thrillers. It’s no great shakes, sadly, and very definitely the weakest of the Sangster-Francis “mini-Hitchcocks” churned out by the studio in the Sixties.

Following a mysterious car wreck, amnesia patient Robert Webber (perhaps best-known for his Blake Edwards comedies) remembers nothing of his identity; doctors have given him the name “Christopher Smith”, after the St Christopher’s medal around his neck. No sooner is he discharged from hospital than, you’ve guessed it, Somebody Starts Trying To Drive Him Nuts. An unknown benefactor grants him the use of a swank bachelor pad in an otherwise half-built and deserted apartment block, and (wouldn’t you know it?) Webber quickly starts hearing strange voices emanating from the empty flat next door: a man and woman engaged in heated argument, culminating with an act of presumably lethal violence. But when Webber rushes in, there’s nobody there…

Still odder is the significance of a torn magazine advertisement, featuring a flash Audrey Hepburn-type whom nobody seems able to name. Webber suddenly spots her in the flesh, driving past him in a sports car: he chases the car on foot, and sees the woman watching him. Is she playing with him? Returning to the flat, he finds the sports car parked outside – and the driver waiting for him inside his apartment. She is his mysterious benefactor, and apparently owns the apartment building. Why is she being so helpful to an apparent stranger? Surely she can’t be in cahoots with Webber’s psychiatrist, in a plot to murder the doc’s wife and blame it all on a deranged amnesiac who hears voices…? Oh, you’ve heard it before.

There’s a minor (very minor) twist to the tale, in that Webber has been fibbing all along about losing his memory – he knows full well who he is and how he got into that car crash (though as for his real name, I don’t believe it’s ever revealed). Turns out he’s a real ne’er-do-well himself, cuckolding husbands all across Europe, and using their women as a means to an end. Intended presumably as a lovable rogue, Webber comes across instead as a borderline sociopath, and not a terribly sympathetic hero. I suppose Sangster was getting bored with driving Janette Scott-types round the twist for their inheritances, and thought he’d try to change the formula a bit. It didn’t work.

As for the trademark Francis style: well, he doesn’t seem to have been firing on all cylinders for this assignment. The monochrome lensing is perfectly fine, if unimaginative; the only sequence to show much flair is staged in the empty apartment next door to Webber’s. Shot in moody darkness, the large Xs of tape on the windows throw shadows on the wall resembling a huge noughts-and-crosses grid: someone, we infer, is playing games. Francis also plays with the aspect ratio here (as he did in The Innocents), blurring either side of the 1.85:1 frame with shadow, effectively reducing the field of vision to a 1.33:1 Academy size – an effective way of conveying Webber’s tunnel vision. Aside from that, Hysteria is a consistently unengaging exercise in cliché, best left to undemanding amnesiacs and Hammer completists.