Though better known by its 1948 remake (THE DARK PAST/’48 - William Holden; Lee J. Cobb - dir. Rudolph Maté*), the first version of James Warwick’s B’way play is the better film. Or rather, makes the better impression. Less from quality than timing; a decade’s growth in audience sophistication on psychiatry making the story’s simplistic underpinnings, still fresh in 1939, looking shopworn a decade later. Freud still alive when this opened, ‘the talking cure,’ here at its most Freudian (kill Dad/bed Mom) something of a magic trick that could happen in a single ten-minute session. Well-directed by Charles Vidor (dig the film's negative-image dream sequence), with a powerfully unbalanced Chester Morris as the escaped killer (playing in vicious James Cagney mode and getting away with it) who takes Professor/Shrink Ralph Bellamy and his lake house guests hostage while he and his gang wait for a rescue boat. And what a nifty cast of crack pots on both sides: Ann Dvorak, the moll who wants Morris cured of his debilitating nightmares till she realizes he might lose his dependency on her; a cool, calculating Milburn Stone before he was Doc on GUNSMOKE; Melville Cooper’s wised-up cuckold showing unexpected toughness; even Joseph Mankiewicz’s real life psychologically fragile wife Rose Stradner as Bellamy’s frightened film wife.
DOUBLE-BILL: *As mentioned, remade as THE DARK PAST. OR: The fascinating first Hollywood film to seriously tackle psychiatric cures & sanatoriums, PRIVATE WORLDS/’35 (Claudette Colbert; Charles Boyer; dir - Gregory L Cava) where the treatments now look absurd, but the psychological interactions between the staff show somebody knew the score.
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