One Psychological Moment, Please

FILMS

By GORDON KAHN

DON’T you think, Doctor, that against secondary oedipal defenses I should be able to counterpose a Widerstand regardless of a repetition-compulsion of Urangst?“

The doctor has behind him sixteen years of medical education, ten of specialization in psychotherapy, and a file of enlightened correspondence postmarked “Wien.” But he is caught flat-footed, with his mind in cement. He hasn’t been to the movies in a

year.

“Natürlich,” he says, meaning yes and no. “If we rule out—

“Rule out anything but reaction-formation of concurrent narcissism.”

“Aber —”

“Certainly not with syndrome of hallucinatory cathexis, don’t you think?

“Ah — dreams,” probes the doctor, and scores.

“And the only way I can describe them is in simple, layman’s language. They’re anagogic. Anagogic as all get-out.”

The doctor defrosts. Here’s a simple fellow who has picked up a few random professional phrases while shopping around for treatment. And now, by Mesmer! — he’ll get it. “I might suggest a trial analysis.”

“Where have you been, Doc? Why, that technique went out with Lady in the Dark — you know, where Ginger Rogers goes off into a lot of yacketyyack there on the couch.”

“Just to fix a point of departure.”

“Frame of reference, you mean.”

“Precisely. By free-association —”

“Are you kidding, Doc? That stuff was all right in Spellbound, where Bergman and that little Russian analyst had Gregory Peck on the ropes. Put old Freud back on the shelf along with Charcot.”

“But Freud discovered— ”

“And so did Columbus. But you wouldn’t think of using his maps now! What about Selznick — and Zanuck—”

The patient himself is a busy man. He wants to catch The Spiral Staircase and The Blue Dahlia before they put up the night prices.

“I’ll go for narcosis,” he says, “the way Doc Larsen gave it to Ann Todd in The Seventh Veil. Just hit me lightly with one cubic centimeter of pentathal intramuscularly, and in a couple of minutes I’ll open up like fourth-class mail.”

And no reaching for that crock of insulin, either, Doc. This man is hep. He’s seen the movie Shock. Twice, he’s seen it. He knows what a maniacal psychiatrist is likely to do with a hypo of insulin.

Yet, before the motion pictures took over the entire bazaar of the mind, all this poor man complained about was lower-plate wobble. If he dreamed at all it was wholesomely, of Jeanie with the light-brown hair. While film stood at the psychical threshold, an amnesia victim was about as complicated a figure as it dared to handle.

The amnesiac would be made to suffer two fierce cracks on the head. The first assault was by a Daimler, on Old Bond Street, London, W.1. As a result of that, he becomes (a) balmy; (b) a noted barrister; (c) a member of the Privy Council; (d) a belted earl. Twenty years later, in Hyde Park, while he was shouting, “Peace in our time! Huzza for Chamberlain!" a Dubliner named Leopold Bloom slugs him on the temple with a tin of Plumtree’s potted meat.

A choice between the distinguished bores and the characters in the back of Havelock Ellis’s works is not difficult to make, in favor of the latter. But supplanting the member of the Aqua Velva After Shave Club with Lombroso’s Delinquent Man has in too many instances made burlesques of science. Psychoanalysts will continue to be portrayed as buffoons, incompetents, or criminals until they make a formal, organized protest to the film producers.

It has been twenty film years since a surgeon entered an operating theater drunk. Now, when he recognizes the man under the ether-cone as Raoul Palafox, his wife’s lover, just one lateral slit with the bistoury severing the . . . but no! He sweats it out, and the wretch recovers, only to go back to the Argentine— this time with the doctor’s daughter.

In California flix, where dozens of screen writers, directors, and producers are undergoing psychoanalysis or have already been bleached out, there are enough practitioners to demand for themselves as much respect as the films give to phrenologists, corn doctors, and deputy sheriffs. Occasionally, one who is hired as technical expert is able to impose some accuracies on the film. But the analysts still listen too little and talk too much, usually with Weber and Fields accents.

With new characters like psychotics and psychiatrists to deal with, and with every convolution of the human mind possible of photography under new techniques, the dramatic content has not advanced a single foot. The Chase (“get to the crossing and throw the switch before the Limited bisects the heroine”) and the Cinderella theme remain the standard formulas.

Represented as the best thing done along psychiatric lines thus far, The Seventh Veil, an English importation, turns out to be vastly overtouted. Hollywood has already uttered every motion picture from which this one cribbed a bright slab. The fact that the heroine is a certified manic-depressive, bent on suicide until her psyche is ventilated by a Middle European analyst, is not enough to obscure the clichés which hold together a mosaic of Jane Eyre, Suspicion, Rebecca, Trilby, and chips of A Song to Remember.

Miss Todd in The Seventh Veil is a waif, looking as waif-like as a thirty-year-old Duse can, in pinafore and cotton stockings. She is sent to live with her uncle, James Mason, who has no visible means of support, and none is hinted at, but who inhabits a house as big as the Morgan Wing of the Metropolitan Museum. Mr. Mason snarls and yaps and finally svengalizes her into becoming a very hot pianist.

Throughout the picture Mr. Mason clumps around the house with a walking stick, although there is no reason given for his limp. Having seen Mr. Mason’s prototypes in other pictures, we are to assume that his barb threw him during the hunt. A simple orthopedic shoe would serve to make him walk normally. But he needs that knobkerrie. It is the most important prop in the picture. For, later, when Miss Todd at her piano tells him that she has fallen in love with a man, he lays about him with that cudgel. He wants to break her hands so that she’ll never play again. It isn’t possible that he missed one of the eighty-eight keys on the instrument, but her fingers weren’t even bruised. What the man really needed was glasses.

Characters bent on self-destruction in motion pictures rarely do a thorough job, even though implements for Selbstmord are handy. Like Miss Todd, they prefer drowning. The males walk into the surf as a rule, and the girls, like Miss Todd, pitch themselves from the Embankment into the Thames. Their rescuers are either bobbies who shout, '’Ere! ‘Ere, young woman!” or gentlemen walking home from The Club. In the latter case, the man has quite a tussle. They beat their little hsts on his chest screaming, “Let me go! You have no right — !” The next scene finds the girl ensconced in His Rooms smiling up from behind a steaming cup of Bovril.

Throughout The Seventh Veil Miss Todd plays many fine pieces on the piano, including the M arsaw Concerto, ” which is rapidly becoming the “Eli, Eli" of the sound screen.

Lines just, as long as those waiting to see Veil were observed at Specter of the Rose, which proves to be a rather limp piece of salami. The Boy’s condition could be determined instantly, even by a naturopath, as dementia praecox. He had already slain his wife at an earlier performance of the ballet, but he looks as if butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth. He knows that eventually he will do the same to the Girl. She knows it. He knows that she knows it. But they do nothing except repeat this cozy prognosis like a mantra.

Eventually, they are fugitives, he as much from his guilty neurotic self as from the law. She is sleepless. As soon as her head drops, he will have at her, with Ben Hecht’s personal letter opener, a Florentine dagger. She sleeps at last. He dances, and with each veronica he brings the blade nearer to her throat. Finally, he lays his knife, itself a sacrifice, at her sacrificial throat and does his last leap out of the window, falling twenty — maybe thirty — stories. The picture is over before he lands.

But there are others coming, about nymphs, satyrs, and cretins, until one fine day we’ll have Van Johnson back again as fun-loving Buster, the Nice Boy Next Door who’d as soon kiss a girl as break a strike.