Warmup for Murder

Return from the Ashes borrows polished Actress Ingrid Thulin from Ingmar Bergman's glittering stable, and puts her to posture in one of those lady-in-a-jam thrillers, impossible to believe but easy to enjoy. With a script that gives her lucid intelligence little to fasten upon, Actress Thulin often seems well beyond the wit's end of the character she plays--a Jewish doctor who returns to Paris after World War II, eager to pick up her successful practice and her ne'er-do-well young husband.

Maximilian Schell is persuasively shallow as the husband, a freeloading chess champion who has always been deeply in love with his wife's money. Believing her dead, he has seduced her winsome, scheming stepdaughter (Samantha Eggar), first in line for the family fortune. Ingrid appears incognito, hair darkened, the scars of her concentration-camp ordeal erased by surgery, and is not recognized at first because that would spoil the plot. She falls into a mistaken-identity hoax engineered by Samantha, soon finds herself impersonating a woman who is hired to impersonate her real self.

Before all scores are settled, Samantha discovers who is not who, abhors her demotion to second fiddle in a menage a trois, and quickly improvises a plan to murder her stepmother. Max prefers his own scheme, which is to eliminate both women, leaving himself as Ingrid's sole beneficiary. Ashes departs considerably from the French novel on which it is based, but Director J. Lee Thompson smoothly stretches out the tension of a creepy bathtub sequence, followed by an explosive climax involving a booby-trapped safe. Finally, though, this who'll-do-it must be appreciated chiefly as a challenge to the ingenuity of three attractive performers, warming up goulash on the back burner.

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