Tediously trudging through Oedipal territory, Rudolph Maté’s The Dark Past is yet another of the era’s barely tolerable advertisements for Freudian psychoanalysis that's undone by a heaping of dramatically inert exposition. Escaped convict Al Walker (William Holden) takes a family hostage, only to discover that the man of the house, Dr. Andrew Collins (Lee J. Cobb), is also a police psychiatrist whose specialty is rehabilitating criminals via therapy and dream analysis. It’s not long before repressed childhood traumas are revealed to be the cause of Walker’s violent tendencies – as well as the reason his fingers are paralyzed in a Spider-Man web-slinging position – but there’s nothing revelatory about Maté’s stilted staging, a speech-heavy script, and by-the-numbers performances from a wild-eyed Holden and pensive Cobb. The latter, in particular, is painfully miscast, so much so that whenever he’s forced to patiently listen to Walker recount his nightmares, Cobb’s Collins looks less like a compassionate counselor and more like a man using every last ounce of strength to keep from beating the living hell out of his whiny, mamma’s boy captor.
I've read every review I could find on this movie, which I just saw for the first time last night. I was looking for something that viewed Dr. Collins' cabin, all three stories of it, as something akin to the id, ego and superego of Al Walker's mind. I could just about see the killer's girlfriend - the only character with access to all three stories - as meant to symbolize his anima, the Collins child as the killer's own inner child, etc. Even the killer's stooges seemed to represent the "censor band" of the psyche, determined to keep each element on its own floor. And of course the "household help," imprisoned in the basement, could easily represent anger and fear in the unconscious mind. One was really ticked off and the other couldn't stop crying. Plus one escaped and set the climax in motion, not so long after Dr. Collins lectured Al Walker about how hard it is for the censor band to keep the unconscious stuff under wraps. Toward the end, all I could think about was how cool it would be if Woody Allen did a remake.
Posted by: Joan Kennedy | August 05, 2007 at 04:00 PM