The screen writer (Apr-Oct 1948)

tions of neurotic and psychotic people are as logical, deterministically, as the ways of the person who passes for normal. In passing, I might add that I question the wisdom of showing films which make quite a thing of seemingly uncaused mental states. Such pictures may heighten the tension of those movie-goers who are already emotionally upset or close to the borderline of a serious mental disturbance. Deeply neurotic individuals are usually lost and rudderless. They feel helpless and in the grip of forces they fear and don't understand. For that reason, one of the primary aims of therapy is to help a disturbed individual to realize that he is not a helpless victim of forces outside himself and that he can become, within limits, the master of his own destiny. With Fear in the Night we get a somewhat different variation on the theme that a man's personality may explode in his face at a moment's notice, regardless of his make-up. Fear in the Night is a whodunit film with a psychiatric twist. It concerns a youth who commits a murder and then tries to take his own life while under the influence of hypnosis. He shows no predisposing psychopathic or criminal tendencies that I can detect. He is an ordinary lad with no more than the usual load of post-adolescent insecurity, who is led astray by a criminally motivated amateur hypnotist. The catch to this particular treatment of motivation is a fairly fundamental one. It is this: No comparatively normal human being takes a fling at murder or suicide simply because he has been transported into a hypnotic state. For this reason alone, the picture Fear in the Night is purveying nonsense. PSYCHOTHERAPY WHILE YOU WAIT TF the typical psychological film falls ■*-short with its histories and diagnoses, it is equally inept in treating the processes by which neurotic individuals are relieved of their emotional ailments. Most of the producers of our films with a psychoneurotic problem find irresistible the various techniques of brief psychotherapy. All too often on the sceen, magic steps in to wipe out the gravest of emotional disorders. Lazarus walks from his psychosomatic sick bed on a studio lot with the greatest of ease. First of all, the psychic wonderworkers in the world of film raise the dead by resurrecting the single traumatic incident. Such is the implication of Spellbound and Secret Beyond the Door. The central character in each of these pictures is seriously ill. He is only a hair's breadth this side of psychosis. Yet each of the two individuals is cured in a flash, the moment a certain repressed memory is dragged forward or upward into his conscious mind. Such portrayals of the leavening processes of psychotherapy may have entertainment value. I can not say. But I do know that comparable metamorphoses of character do not occur in the clinic. Moreover, to the best of my knowledge, no responsible group of psychologists or psychiatrists endorses literally the thesis of change which either of these two films suggests. For something really out of the ordinary in therapy-on-the-run, the honors might seem to be equally divided between Secret Beyond the Door and The Guilt of Janet Ames. I defer to Janet Ames myself. In this picture, two amateur psychologists go to work on one another. Each of the neophytes is gravely disturbed. One is a charming but far-advanced alcoholic. The other, an attractive young war widow, has conversion symptoms. (Continued on Page 24) Jin ffMemnrtam NED DANDY 1887 1948 10 The Screen Writer, September, 1948