The Man Who Wasn't There

Santa Rosa (California), 1949. Ed Crane is a gray-looking, closed-mouth barber working in a shop owned by his wife’s brother. He is utterly dissatisfied with his mundane life and sexually-barren marriage. Ed is emotionally numb, staring for hours at his customer’s hair and the walls of a shop that feels like a cage. Opportunity knocks when Ed realizes that his pretentious, upwardly mobile wife Doris is having an affair with her married employer, Big Dave, the well-to-do owner of a department store. When Creighton Tolliver, a stranger who appears out of the blue, offers the intriguing proposition of going into the rapidly growing dry-cleaning business as equal partners, Ed sees it as a salvation from his dreary life. All he needs is $ 10,000 … (Screen International)