Post by Doghouse6 on Aug 16, 2020 0:19:32 GMT
Sometimes, things don't become noticeable until later, when you stumble across something that makes them noticeable in retrospect.
What the hell am I talkin' about? This: in Sunset Blvd, Nancy Olson is making suggestions to William Holden about improvements to one of his stories. "To being with, I think you should throw out all that psychological stuff, exploring the killer's sick mind." Cynical Holden replies, "Psychopaths sell like hotcakes."
I've just seen for the first time The Dark Past, a film of which I hadn't been aware, that was released the year Sunset Blvd went into production. Following the basic construction of Key Largo, released the year before, it involves escaped con and psychopathic killer Holden holing up with his gang at the secluded weekend home of psychiatrist Lee J. Cobb to await a rendezvous with others to complete their getaway.
As the hours pass, the unrelentingly cool and unflappable Cobb uses the tools of his training to get inside the head of explosive and constantly on edge Holden, keenly observing and questioning his behavior, delving into his childhood, analyzing his dreams and, in short, "exploring the killer's sick mind." The line from Sunset Blvd never meant anything special to me before, but I must now surmise that it was deliberately inserted by Wilder and Brackett into their screenplay as an intentional inside reference to The Dark Past, one of Holden's early postwar films after a four-year hiatus, when he was restarting his film career after military service.
As with many films of the period employing psychoanalysis as plot devices, the treatment is now laughably simplistic: recover the memory of a traumatic event, and your neuroses instantly disappear. But setting that criticism aside, The Dark Past is a dramatically sound and satisfying little exercise in psychological battles of wit, will and balances of power, with a very nice role for Nina Foch as Holden's unfailingly loyal but quietly concerned moll. An added attraction is the reunion of Cobb and Holden, who had played father and son in Golden Boy, Holden's first major role, a decade earlier.
EDIT for afterthought: now I think of it, the story they were discussing in Sunset Blvd was called "Dark Windows."
What the hell am I talkin' about? This: in Sunset Blvd, Nancy Olson is making suggestions to William Holden about improvements to one of his stories. "To being with, I think you should throw out all that psychological stuff, exploring the killer's sick mind." Cynical Holden replies, "Psychopaths sell like hotcakes."
I've just seen for the first time The Dark Past, a film of which I hadn't been aware, that was released the year Sunset Blvd went into production. Following the basic construction of Key Largo, released the year before, it involves escaped con and psychopathic killer Holden holing up with his gang at the secluded weekend home of psychiatrist Lee J. Cobb to await a rendezvous with others to complete their getaway.
As the hours pass, the unrelentingly cool and unflappable Cobb uses the tools of his training to get inside the head of explosive and constantly on edge Holden, keenly observing and questioning his behavior, delving into his childhood, analyzing his dreams and, in short, "exploring the killer's sick mind." The line from Sunset Blvd never meant anything special to me before, but I must now surmise that it was deliberately inserted by Wilder and Brackett into their screenplay as an intentional inside reference to The Dark Past, one of Holden's early postwar films after a four-year hiatus, when he was restarting his film career after military service.
As with many films of the period employing psychoanalysis as plot devices, the treatment is now laughably simplistic: recover the memory of a traumatic event, and your neuroses instantly disappear. But setting that criticism aside, The Dark Past is a dramatically sound and satisfying little exercise in psychological battles of wit, will and balances of power, with a very nice role for Nina Foch as Holden's unfailingly loyal but quietly concerned moll. An added attraction is the reunion of Cobb and Holden, who had played father and son in Golden Boy, Holden's first major role, a decade earlier.
EDIT for afterthought: now I think of it, the story they were discussing in Sunset Blvd was called "Dark Windows."