Mine own Executioner
(Featuring Burgess Meredith,
Dulcie Gray and Kieron Moore.)
I have little to say on the adaptation of this novel. What interested me more were the comments of the audience in my immediate vicinity, because these seemed to suggest certain technical difficulties in the presentation of psychiatry.
Firstly, the use of drugs. This was considered ” the way they do it”, and viewed with pleasurable apprehension.
Secondly, theroleof the unconscious. It will be remembered that after the session in which the patient confessed, he tried to terminate the treatment. The analyst explained that inside him there was ” something ” that felt uncomfortable because it was being uncovered, and for that reason ” it” was trying to terminate treatment. This was considered mysterious: there was doubt as to whether the ” doctor ” had not made him worse.
Thirdly, arising from the action described above, confusion about schizophrenia. This raises the crucial question about the presentation of mental illness to a lay audience. In this film it is done so sketchily as to be fairly misleading. We get a glimpse of the first page of the case book, with the general diagnosis ” schizophrenia “, then two sub-headings: (a) split mind; (b) deep conflicts in early childhood. Not much enlightenment here?but could it have been done better ?
Fourthly, there seemed to be great difficulties in separating the personality, behaviour and philosophy of Mr. Milne from the theory and practice of psychoanalysis. He touches nearly all his patients in a half-caressing manner; his intentions towards Barbara are no better than they ought to be; he is unhappy; so is his wife; he is a stumbling block in some obscure way at the Institute, etc., etc.
Lastly, there is a lot of talk about the analyst not being medically qualified, but never a word about his real qualifications, except his own remark that he has a certain flair for his work.
But a good time was had by all. N.G. The October Man. (Featuring John Mills and Joan Greenwood.)
This is not a film about psychiatry, but the hero is a man who has been discharged from a mental hospital, and the attitude of a film (with its huge audiences) towards such illnesses must be important to those who would have the public look with hope rather than fear towards their treatment.
The chief point that dominates the film is that a return to the hospital is to the man defeat, and he is shown struggling with great courage and helped by the love of a girl, who is equally determined to save him from that dreadful failure?further medical advice and care. The implication that recovery depends on the man’s will alone is, at its best, out of date and, at the worst, dangerous.
There is, however, nothing alarming about the actual short scene in the hospital where the doctor is saying good-bye to his patient. But though he tells the man that much depends on his keeping calm and living a quiet life during the next few months, the doctor never suggests that he should keep in touch with medical help. h Film Reviews Apart from this mistaken attitude which is implicit in the film, the story is a good one and the scenes in the second-rate boarding house are a delight. P.W. The Upturned Glass. (Featuring James Mason and Rosamund John) In this film once again psychology only appears in conjunction with the abnormal and criminal. It is an exciting film and much of the photography is exceedingly clever, but it would be difficult to leave the cinema without the feeling, conscious or not, that an understanding of man’s mental processes is akin to the knowledge of the occult and brings in its sinister train wickedness, violence and murder. A brain surgeon plots deliberately and brutally to kill a woman in a horrible situation; this same man, who is also a lecturer in criminal psychology, deludes himself into believing that he is a dispenser of justice on a divine scale; and the casting of James Mason as the criminologist ensures that this character shall be subtly played in all its unpleasantness. Psychological vocabulary is used throughout the film and much is made of the technical term ” paranoid “. The surgeon is called ” paranoid ” frequently, apparently because of his conviction that he is called on to dispense justice, and it is stated as a psychological fact that a paranoid always feels compelled to tell someone of his crime. ” Obsessional ” too is another favourite term in the film, used more or less as a synonym of ” paranoid “. Dilys Powell in The Sunday Times has called The Upturned Glass “a neat, empty story of murder with the modish psychological trimmings but they are very large trimmings indeed and, for the most part, false and frightening. P.W. Possessed. (Featuring Joan Crawford, Van Heften and Raymond Massey.) This is an unpleasant story of that fashionable complaint, Schizophrenia. It seems to be a story told for the sake of the complaint, as if one made a film about a man with a serious physical illness for the sole purpose of showing horrific symptoms and excruciating pain. Is it not time that the cinema had a rest from schizophrenia ? One may indeed hope that its day will pass, like that of the inferiority complex. Meantime, from such a film as this, an audience must obtain an inadequate, if not completely false, view of this illness. The psychological vocabulary could hardly be better known?but whether such an illness can ever be shown on the screen in such a way as to be better understood is open to doubt. In Possessed the first symptoms are described in an interview with the doctor, after the woman has spent a night tormented by a mind that conjures up imaginary sights and sounds (with the wind howling and the rain beating against the window-pane outside, to heighten an effect that needed no heightening). The doctor tells her that she is highly suggestible, that the sounds she hears are her own heart beats and that she is finding difficulty in distinguishing reality and unreality. “Doctor,” she says, “you mean I am suffering from schizophrenia ?” The doctor is amazed and says, ” If I had thought that you knew anything about these psychological illnesses, I should not have spoken so freely ” Really, doctor ! Do you never go to the cinema ? ” 84 MENTAL HEALTH Then comes the end. Having killed her lover, she rushes around, her face becoming more and more distraught, the tension growing, until with a final crash she falls into a coma and is taken to hospital. There follows the treatment which The Seventh Veil popularized, the injection and recital of her past life, or rather the part of it in which she endlessly and passionately pursued a man who did not want her. The doctor asserts that the seeds of this collapse were there before she became ” possessed “, but this is a random remark that the picture does not bear out. On the credit side of this discreditable film may be entered a humane attitude to mental illnesses, the assertion of a hope of recovery (though the end of the film leaves this in considerable doubt) and the implication that in America, at any rate, psychological treatment is normal in every hospital and accepted by every doctor. There was also a hint of that great problem of responsibility which juries have to face. “I do assure you,” says the doctor, ” that in killing her lover she was no more responsible for that, than for any of her other actions, but whether a jury will accept that, I do not know.” But this makes the credit side seem larger than it actually is. The whole film is a portrayal of the pathological for its own sake and it is difficult to believe that the effect it is having on the full cinemas to which it plays is a good one. ” I went to see While I Live I heard a 17-year-old girl saying. ” I thought it was good. And I went to Possessed. When Joan Crawford had the apoplectic fit (sic) a child screamed and had to be carried out by its mother. I thought Possessed was good.” I expect she thought Spellbound, Dishonoured Lady, The Upturned Glass, etc., good too?or even very good. P.W.
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