Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 11/05/20

A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Thursday, November 5, 2020

Pressure Point (Hubert Cornfield, 1962)

Bobby Darin and Sidney Poitier in Pressure Point

Cast: Sidney Poitier, Bobby Darin, Peter Falk, Carl Benton Reid, Mary Munday, Howard Caine, Gilbert Green, Barry Gordon, Richard Bakalayan, Lynn Loring, Anne Barton. Screenplay: Hubert Cornfield, S. Lee Pogostin, based on a story by Robert M. Lindner. Cinematography: Ernest Haller. Production design: Rudolph Sternad. Film editing: Frederic Knudtson. Music: Ernest Gold.

Stanley Kramer was a producer best known for "message movies," films aimed at the soft heart of the liberal consensus. Though in his heyday, Kramer's movies were often labeled "controversial," their point of view was rarely more than demonstrations that tolerance was good, prejudice bad. He also directed some of his most famous films, like The Defiant Ones (1958), On the Beach (1959), Inherit the Wind (1960), Judgment at Nuremberg (1961), and Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967). And although he handed over the task of directing Pressure Point to a little-known second-stringer, Hubert Cornfield, it's widely assumed that Kramer also directed much of the film. It was not a box office success. Seen today, it feels more like a TV drama of the era, despite excellent cinematography by Ernest Haller, a nervous score by Ernest Gold, a commanding performance by Sidney Poitier and an incisive one by Bobby Darin. But it also feels like it's taking place in a world that never was: one in which, in 1942, a Black man could be a prison psychiatrist, treating a patient who was arrested on a charge of sedition, for being a member of the pro-Nazi organization the German-American Bund. Poitier's character, known only as "Doctor," is trying to help Darin's "Patient" with the problems he has sleeping. Naturally, this leads to the Nazi Patient taunting the Doctor with his racist beliefs. But when he cures the Patient of insomnia by having him face up to childhood trauma involving his abusive father and clinging mother, the Doctor wants to go further: to treat the Patient's racism as a mental disease. Even Sidney Poitier, at the peak of his "Magical Negro" persona, can't make that turn credible. Still, Pressure Point almost overcomes the artificiality of its story, the simplistic look at psychoanalysis, and the falsification of race relations in the 1940s, thanks to some intense acting. There's a completely gratuitous frame story set in the period when the movie was made, in which the older Doctor (Poitier with artfully grayed hair) counsels a young psychiatrist played by Peter Falk not to give up on his treatment of an especially frustrating patient by telling the story of his experience with the Nazi Patient. Unnecessary at it is, the frame -- like the rest of the movie -- is made watchable by the rapport of the actors.