This disjointed film noir is hobbled by a rambling narrative that spends too much time on a flashback and then devolves into a silly ending in North Dakota (with some hideous rear projection).David Janssen stars as a finder of missing persons, especially heirs. He gets involved in a decade-old mystery in which a movie star vanished. Seems her rich daddy paid lots of hush money and she's long forgotten until her name comes up again after a woman is murdered.Somehow, the case seems to involve a famous movie actor who seems to show up in odd places. Then there's an erudite fat man following him as well as an ex-wife who suddenly pops up.Janssen gets hooked after visiting a a boozy ex-reporter who lets slips a few juicy details about the dead movie star. After a visit to her mother, he's on the trail that takes him, ultimately, to a shack in North Dakota.The mystery isn't much and is given away in the flashback, after which the viewer just waits it out. But there are several excellent performances in this film. Janssen is solid. Jeanne Crain is wasted as the ex-wife. Dina Merrill is surprisingly good as Nikki. William Demarest is excellent as the boozy reporter as is Agnes Moorehead as the flinty mother. Jacques Aubuchon is also very good as the fat man, and Will Wright has a nice bit as the records keeper. Robert Strauss is good as Janssen's pal. That's TCM host Robert Osborne as the sailor with dance tickets. Brad Dexter is badly cast as the movie actor.Certainy worth a look for some great acting and Gerald Fried's driving jazz score.

****SPOILERS**** Privite investigator Tom Adler, David Janssen,who specializes in finding dead person's family members is put to the test here when the secretary to action adventure actor Leroy Dane, Brad Dexter,Julia Joliet played by Gretrude Astor,is found murdered in his office with a scrap book filled with newspapers articles and clippings of Doris Delaney. Doris has gone missing 12 years ago after she found out that she's been put into the family way by a handsome tall & dark stranger who picked her up at the Brown Durby after treating her to a strawberry milkshake. Adler for some reason gets himself involved not in the murdered Julia Joliet's long lost relatives but in the missing and now pronounced dead-by the courts-Doris Delaney. As it soon becomes apparent Adler is or was somehow involved with Doris through his former girlfriend Linda Forster, Jeanne Crain,who he met at a bar a few days later.With all the confusion about this strange as well as mysterious case were then brought back 10 year earlier in 1951 at a ten cents a dance in Tokyo Japan when Alder, just out of the hospital suffering from combat wounds,meets this hot American chick Nicki, Dina Merrill,that he takes for a spin and soon , within 24 hours, falls madly in love with her. What all this has to do with the story is later explained in that Nicki is somehow connected with the missing and presumed dead Doris Delaney!****SPOILERS**** The film tries to tie all its loose ends together in Doris' disappearance and Alder discovering that he in fact had a close relationship with her without even knowing about it! But it's what turned out to be actor Leroy Dane brother Jacques Plechette, Jacques Aubuchon, who fills in all the info blanks or about this very bazaar and off the wall mystery. Far too long complicated and confusing to go into detail the the final outcome in all this has to do with who knocked up Doris back in 1948 when she was a teenager and set all this into motion. With Aubuchon while not too successful in trying to explain to both Alder and the audience what the heck is going on here he ends up shooting the man responsible for all this In self defense of course to finally put an end to all this craziness.

"Twenty Plus Two" is a stylish, ambitious movie with a great look. It's a shame that it's filmed after the height of film noir, but it still has a few great scenes that are noir-ish, and plenty of night scenes in general. The movie starts off in Hollywood 1961 and follows Tom Alder (actor David Janssen) from coast to coast as he figures out a murder mystery and finds a missing person, all the while dealing with a LOT of different characters. I thought it was really well made.The main problem with "Twenty Plus Two" is the casting of Dina Merrill as the female lead. Her character is about 30 years old at the time of the movie, and in flashback scenes, she's about 20. Merrill was 37 when she made this movie and she looked older. She was hardly believable as a 30-year-old woman, and definitely not as a young 20-year-old. She was badly miscast and it affected the movie.Jeanne Crain fares better as a sort of "girl next door" but fifteen years down the line. She plays Linda, who was engaged to Tom before he was sent to Korea, but married someone else while he was away. Now, 11 years after they last saw one another, she wants him back, but he doesn't want her, and she spends half the movie chasing him. She and Janssen are kind of funny in their scenes together.Agnes Moorehead as the missing girl's mother was superb in her scene with David Janssen. It's a long, pivotal scene. I give credit to both actors as their give-and-take was spot on. There's a lot of dialogue in this movie and these two could really deliver lines.The most stylistic and atmospheric scene in the entire movie is a shot of Tom sitting alone in his hotel room, thinking about the past, smoking, and the camera follows the smoke as it rises to the ceiling. It is fantastic.David Janssen is very, very good in this movie. He's cool, and the film's black and white visuals and jazzy score help to underline this. He should have become a major feature film star. As it was, he became a major TV star, and deservedly so.

Even in film noir...especially in film noir...the characters and their relationships have to make some sort of twisted sense. So what do you do when your hero, an investigator who searches for missing heirs, meets a beautiful woman and doesn't recall that they were lovers a few years before? Just because she changed her name and her hairdo. You figure it's about as logical as his investigation into the brutal murder of a fan club secretary for which no one seems to have hired him. There are some nice touches in the film -- William Demarest is terrific as a boozy newspaperman, Agenes Moorehead nails a salty old dowager and Jacques Aubachon makes an elegantly talkative con artist. On the other hand, Janet Leigh is mostly window dressing and David Janssen spends too much of the movie muttering moodily.