'Dead Again' brings new life to classic movies

Dead Again" makes some of the best movies of the past live again. While it couldn't be more derivative, it's so elegant and so witty that it leaves one open-mouthed in admiration. Kenneth Branagh, whose first feature was 1989's "Henry V" and whose second feature tis is, does not seem capable of doing wrong.

Branagh and his equally precocious scriptwriter, Scott Frank -- both men are barely 30 -- set out to make a film that is as Hitchcockian as possible. As in such movies as "Vertigo," a detective investigates a crime whose solution may bring about his own death and/or that of the woman he loves.

Branagh and his real-life wife, the English actress Emma Thompson, each play two roles. Private investigator Mike Church (Branagh) is called upon to try to find the identity of the mysterious Grace (Thompson), who has lost her memory and her ability to speak. Through the efforts of an eccentric antiques dealer (Derek Jacobi) with a gift for hypnosis, Grace is "regressed" back to a former identity. It seems that she may be the reincarnation of the famous pianist Margaret Strauss (also Thompson) who was apparently murdered by her equally famous conductor-composer husband, Roman Strauss (Branagh again).

This basic scenario gives birth to two movies -- one set in the past in black and white and acted in the style of 1940s film noir and another in color acted in contemporary fashion. This tour de force of film making is subjected to incredible narrative twists and turns that seem -- in the end -- to have been logical and inevitable.

But if the movie is Hitchcockian, Branagh's use of the camera clearly pays homage to the Orson Welles of "Citizen Kane." The best of several artful allusions to that movie involves Mike Church's visit to the old-age home where Gray Baker (Andy Garcia) is dying. The scene recalls the visit of the reporter to the aging Joseph Cotten in the earlier film only to ring some dazzlingly bizarre changes upon it.

Like Laurence Olivier -- his great British predecessor as an actor-director -- Branagh has a knack for freeing actors to do their best work. He himself is so fine in the two parts -- with faultless accents as the American Mike Church and the German Roman Strauss -- that some moviegoers may not realize that it is the same actor until the movie is almost half over.