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.  

The Wild One (Laslo Benedek, 1953)

Mary Murphy and Marlon Brando in The Wild One

Cast: Marlon Brando, Mary Murphy, Robert Keith, Lee Marvin, Jay C. Flippen, Peggy Maley, Hugh Sanders, Ray Teal, John Brown, Will Wright, Robert Osterloh, William Vedder, Yvonne Doughty. Screenplay: John Paxton, based on a story by Frank Rooney. Cinematography: Hal Mohr. Production design: Rudolph Sternad. Film editing: Al Clark. Music: Leith Stevens.

The best performance in The Wild One isn't Marlon Brando's, it's Lee Marvin as Chino, the head of a rival motorcycle gang. Marvin brings a looseness and wit to the role that is lacking in Brando's performance, though the role itself calls on Brando to do little but act sullen. He also looks a little porky in his jeans and leather jacket, and his somewhat high-pitched voice gives an epicene quality to Johnny Strabler, leader of the Black Rebels Motorcycle Club. Brando does, however, get the film's most familiar line: When Johnny is asked what he's rebelling against, he's drumming to the beat of the music on the jukebox and retorts, "What've you got?" But it's a measure of the general mediocrity of The Wild One that this exchange is immediately reprised by someone telling others about Johnny's retort, essentially stepping on the line. There are a few good moments in the film, mostly contributed by Marvin and by some effective choreography of the motorcycle riders, as in the scene in which good girl Kathie Bleeker (Mary Murphy) is menaced by the gang and then rescued by Johnny. But censorship sapped the life out of the film: The motorcycle gangs are scarcely more intimidating than fraternity boys on a spree. There's an attempt to spice things up with a scene between Johnny and Britches (Yvonne Doughty), a female hanger-on with the rival gang, suggesting that they once had something going on, but the bit goes nowhere and seems mainly designed to allow the actress to display her perky breasts in a tight sweater. As with any of the countless biker movies that capitalized on the box office success of The Wild One, there's a queer subtext to be explicated in all this male bonding, but it doesn't add much to a movie that now seems as dated as the flaming youth films of the 1920s.

High Noon (Fred Zinnemann, 1952)

Gary Cooper and Grace Kelly in High Noon

Marshal Will Kane: Gary Cooper
Amy Fowler Kane: Grace Kelly
Harvey Pell: Lloyd Bridges
Helen Ramirez: Katy Jurado
Jonas Henderson: Thomas Mitchell
Percy Mettrick: Otto Kruger
Martin Howe: Lon Chaney Jr.
Sam Fuller: Harry Morgan
Frank Miller: Ian MacDonald
Jack Colby: Lee Van Cleef
Mildred Fuller: Eve McVeagh
Dr. Mahin: Morgan Farley
Jim Pierce: Robert J. Wilkie
Ben Miller: Sheb Wooley

Director: Fred Zinnemann
Screenplay: Carl Foreman
Based on a story by John W. Cunningham
Cinematography: Floyd Crosby
Production design: Rudolph Sternad
Film editing: Elmo Williams, Harry Gerstad
Music: Dimitri Tiomkin

High Noon, as has often been noted, is a movie of almost classical simplicity, adhering to the unities of place (the town of Hadleyville) and time (virtually, with perhaps only a little fudging, the runtime of the film). There are no flashbacks -- the only expository moment involves a shot of an empty chair -- and no preliminaries or codas: It begins with the wedding of Will Kane and Amy Fowler, and ends with a shot of them riding out of town. It's what makes the movie enduringly satisfying, but also what once seemed to make people want to superadd a layer of significance by interpreting it as a parable about blacklisting. That would have been inevitable anyway, since screenwriter Carl Foreman had been called before the House Un-American Activities Committee and left the country before the film was released. But it strains the tight confines of the film's narrative. Not surprisingly, High Noon took some hits from critics on the right like John Wayne, but it was also stigmatized for a long time as "pretentious." Andrew Sarris called it an "anti-populist anti-Western," but that, too, seems to me to burden the film with too much message. (Anyway, aren't Westerns, with their emphasis on wandering loners, essentially "anti-populist"?) Sixty-five years later, it's possible to view High Noon as nothing more than a neat and tidy narrative about simple heroism, which is not at all "anti-Western," a phrase that suggests far more psychological complexity than the movie possesses. Will Kane is still the good guy and Frank Miller and his gang are black-hearted baddies. If you want moral complexity, go watch The Searchers (John Ford, 1956) or The Wild Bunch (Sam Peckinpah, 1969). It's true that High Noon was overpraised at the time, winning four Oscars -- for Cooper, film editors Elmo Williams and Harry Gerstad, composer Dimitri Tiomkin for the score and, with lyricist Ned Washington, the song "High Noon (Do Not Forsake Me, Oh My Darlin')" -- and nominations for best picture, director, and screenplay. But that the Academy should even have acknowledged the virtues of a Western, a genre it typically looked down upon, is significant -- even though it reverted to its usual indifference to the genre a few years later, when it entirely ignored The Searchers.