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A marriage fantasy couches the cultivated cod of Ben Hecht's screenplay, Miss Frozen Puss meets the Eminent Dr. X. Green Manors, a lavish institution for ripe mental cases, Antonioni's nymphomaniac (La Notte) is immediately recognized. "I see. It's my subconscious putting up a fight." The repressed analyst (Ingrid Bergman) thaws with the staff's latest addition (Gregory Peck), their kiss mingles with vaginal portals swinging open in the archest joke Lubitsch never made. Supposedly the author of The Labyrinth of the Guilt Complex, the fellow turns out to be a haunted amnesiac and potential murderer, his mind reeling at the sight of parallel lines on tablecloths and bedspreads. Therapy on the run, in trains and hotels and skiing slopes. "Will you love me just as much when I'm normal?" From the house detective fancying himself "kind of a psychologist" to the police lieutenant vexed at being called "a mama's boy," everybody's into this cerebral fad, Alfred Hitchcock takes humorous stock. (Pabst's Secrets of the Soul is a noteworthy forerunner.) "Brilliant but lifeless" is the verdict of the colleagues on the heroine, who beams serenely upon hearing that "women make the best psychoanalysts, until they fall in love. After that, they make the best patients." Michael Chekhov as her old mentor is straight out of Hawks' Ball of Fire, he calmly disarms the razor-wielding fugitive with a glass of drugged milk gulped in a subjective shot that blanches the screen. The famous Salvador Dalí dream sequence flattens Un Chien Andalou into an exotic flipbook, the camera-as-pistol properly turns on the audience. "The more cockeyed, the better for the scientific side of it." Hitchcock revises this brilliantly in Marnie, though not before Huston has his own fun in Freud. Cinematography by George Barnes. With Leo G. Carroll, Rhonda Fleming, John Emery, Norman Lloyd, Wallace Ford, Bill Goodwin, Steven Geray, Donald Curtis, Art Baker, and Regis Toomey. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |