(1948)

William Holden, Lee J.Cobb, Nina Foch; dir: Rudolph Maté

It’s not surprising that Hollywood would choose the thriller genre to press the Freudian revolution into its own service. Like the private eye (or crusading journalist, another cinematic variant), the shrink’s approach is inquisitorial: they advance by asking questions. Both like to report back verbally on the progress of their investigations, the psychiatrist in a deepening dialogue with the patient, who shares their objective, and the P.I. using voiceover to share with us, the audience, our shared interest in their quest. Film noir in particular was a sucker for psychoanalysis, with dream sequences and flashbacks often augmenting the voiceover through which our enlightenment grows.

What’s surprising then is how rarely Hollywood tried to adapt the shrink to the gumshoe mold. In this regard The Dark Past, which does push the parallel pretty much to its limit, is virtually in a field of one (or one and a half, given that it’s a remake). Hitchcock’s Spellbound (1945) goes close, but doesn’t explicitly employ the analyst-patient relationship to fight crime, as occurs here. The Locket (1946) is another example, this time with an actual shrink as one character, but not the doctor-patient relationship.

Freudianism was hugely popular in 1940s Hollywood on a number of levels. Its emergence was timely, because as the world, with first Hitler and then the Holocaust, grew increasingly dark and inexplicable, people turned inward to seek answers. This darkness also favors the thriller mode as the site of psychoanalysis’ eventual onscreen application.

Most of The Dark Past anticipates The Desperate Hours (1955), the archetype of suburban hostage-taking that would be elaborated in Cape Fear (1962). Its ‘analysis’ sequence is mercifully economical and over quickly. Most of the drama is buildup, a mental duel between gangster and doctor reproducible in the chess pieces which Holden continually hovers over as if drawn in, yet simultaneously afraid of their mystery.

What initially seems like questionable casting against type, with the gruff, pipe-smoking Cobb as a professor of psychology scrutinising the still ‘golden boy’ features of a twitchy William Holden was actually inspired decision-making. It sets off their strengths, which would have been otherwise unbalanced as an uneven mismatch between brawn and brain (science).

Nina Foch, who comes off like a Marlene Dietrich manqué, is constantly calibrating the risks and benefits of the doctor’s interest in her Johnny and adds a welcome seam of complexity to the characterisations.

There’s no question that we’re being aligned strongly with Cobb’s character in The Dark Past and, early, there’s an interesting use of subjective point of view camera showing us the world through his eyes when he arrives at work, entering the police station.

The Dark Past is a taut, well directed little thriller and mostly surprisingly un-hokey, given how seriously wrong this early stab at a new science could have gone. Director Rudolph Maté shows that his subsequent noir victories of D.O.A. (1949) and Union Station (1950), again with Holden, were no flukes.

I’m reliably informed, from someone who saw the original version of this film, Blind Alley, on first release in 1939 that The Dark Past is a very faithful remake, just stretched out a bit longer. However the fact that it didn’t employ a newly-minted screenplay, and that no trend or cycle ensued given the strong possibilities inherent in the shrink-as-private-eye analogue, suggests that The Dark Past may have been a failed experiment and, unlike its scientific subject matter, something of a dead end.

- Roger Westcombe