Remembering to forget

A mind, they say, is a terrible thing to waste. But in movies, a memory is an excellent thing to lose.

Two new pictures feature characters who suffer memory loss: In "50 First Dates," Adam Sandler has to re-woo an absent-minded Drew Barrymore every day; in "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind," opening March 19, a couple (Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet) have their bad memories erased to save the relationship. Both movies come on the heels of John Woo's "Paycheck," that Ben Affleck vehicle about an engineer whose memory is wiped clean after every top-secret job.

Often, movies use a lost or stolen memory as a vehicle for suspense or as a comment on a national situation; during World War II, soldiers lost their memories in several genres. And sometimes a character will have his or her brain washed in the name of nonsense. Here's a trip down memory lane.

Tarzan the Tiger (1929): The king of the jungle (Frank Merrill) is in trouble again. This time he's sold into slavery, and after a blow to the head he forgets he's Tarzan. The movie momentarily forgets that Tarzan thwacks his chest and rescues Jane but remembers to keep its racism full of cheer.

The Great Dictator (1940): Charlie Chaplin's first talkie, a genius farce, stars the director in dual roles: a Hitleresque despot and an amnesiac barber. The barber winds up being mistaken for the mustachioed ruler. He recovers just in time to find out that said dictator is not so great after all.

Random Harvest (1942): Ronald Coleman plays a World War I soldier who, during combat, loses his memories of his old life. After the war, he marries a singer (Greer Garson) and becomes a writer. Life is fabulous until a car accident

brings back his old memories and wipes out his new life. One of a host of war-borne amnesia tales to sweep the '40s, but only here do the soapsuds reach the heavens.

Spellbound (1945): A Hitchcock classic in which an amnesiac (Gregory Peck), posing as a psychotherapist and accused of murder, runs off with an actual shrink (Ingrid Bergman). Together they try to get to the bottom of his delusions, namely through a therapy session in which we learn, astoundingly, that Peck dreams in an interlude by Salvador Dali.

Mr. Arkadin (1955): A tycoon (Orson Welles) hires a hustler (Robert Arden) to investigate his past, which he can't remember. All the hustler's contacts are turning up dead. Welles works with verve to dredge up the ambiguous fog of film noir in this fleet, allegorical thriller.

La Jetee (1962): In some ways the opposite of the conventional memory-loss movie. Director Chris Marker's landmark concerns, among other things, a man fixated on a murder he saw as a boy. He's sent back in time from a postapocalyptic present, in which people are adrift precisely because they have no tenable memory of the past to ground them.

The Manchurian Candidate (1962): A soldier (Laurence Harvey) returns home from the Korean War having been hypnotized to carry off an assassination when prodded by a certain trigger. In the meantime, he's grandly manipulated by everyone around him, including his shamelessly ambitious mommy (Angela Lansbury). Forget a lack of memory, he soon lacks a self.

The Morning After (1986): In this Sidney Lumet thriller, Jane Fonda plays a drunk, has-been actress who wakes up next to yet another man whose name she can't remember. This one happens to be very dead. She knows enough to clear all signs of her having been there and to start a dangerous romance with an alcoholic ex-cop (Jeff Bridges).

Overboard (1987): A pampered millionairess (Goldie Hawn) falls from her yacht and washes up with no memory of her snotty self. A single carpenter (Kurt Russell), whom she's denigrated, seizes his opportunity, making her do his housework and mother his four kids. It should be noted that the prank is considered an act of revenge.

Total Recall (1990): The question here is not what happens when you can't remember anything but what happens when you remember too much. From the mind of Philip K. Dick comes this Paul Verhoeven futurama in which Arnold Schwarzenegger may be living a downloaded life of fake memories. The quest for truth produces a high body count and a wonderfully paranoid and frequently intelligible performance from Schwarzennegger, who's smart to wonder, "If I'm not me, then who the hell am I?"

Dead Again (1991): Emma Thompson stars as a mute amnesiac who undergoes therapy, only to discover her memory is coughing up past-life experiences. The film jumps back and forth between the 1990s and the 1940s, when Thompson shows up as the wife of a German composer who's put on death row for her murder and who's played by the movie's director, Kenneth Branagh. What's saddest about this Wellesian thriller is that nobody remembers it.

Mulholland Drive (2001): A mysterious accident leaves a woman (Laura Elena Harring) with no idea who she is. An aspiring starlet (Naomi Watts) comes to her emotional -- and eventually sexual -- rescue. Together, they try to solve the mystery of her identity like a psycho-sleuthing Betty and Veronica. But other questions emerge in David Lynch's magnum opus: Who's really doing the remembering here, and why not start a Lynchian wing of psychology?

Memento (2001): Running in reverse chronological order, Chris and Jonathan Nolan's hipster thriller concerns a man (Guy Pearce) suffering from severe short-term memory loss, a condition not conducive to solving your wife's murder. To keep the facts straight, he starts taking Polaroids and tattooing his body with relevant details.

The Bourne Identity (2002): Assassin Jason Bourne (Matt Damon) can't remember who he is, so he pays a girl (Franka Potente) to drive him to Paris and help him find out. It's not long before he discovers he's really good at martial arts and making extremely narrow escapes.

The Man Without a Past (2002): In Aki Kaurismaki's understated Finnish comedy, a gentleman (Markku Peltola) is mugged, knocked on the head, and left for dead. He recovers with no memory of who he was the day before. But rather than search for his old self, he lives in the present, the point being that where you've come from isn't so important as where you are.

Gothika (2003): Bedraggled shrink Halle Berry wakes up accused of murdering her husband. Naturally, she has no memory of this. It's been blocked out by all manner of ghosts, soundtrack noise, and one traumatic event. The film tries to make sense as a psychological thriller, but it's effective only as psychological trash.

Wesley Morris can be reached at wmorris@globe.com.