Pressure Point (1962)

Oscar® winner* Sidney Poitier sizzles in an electrifying role (Show Business Illustrated) as a prison psychiatrist who clashes with a racist inmate (Bobby Darin) in this explosive and provocative (Citizen News) drama that packs a powerful wallop (LA Herald Examiner)! A prison doctor is charged with treating a hate-filled young man who s been jailed for sedition. As he probes the patient s nightmares the psychiatrist realizes his twisted visions mask a lust for violence. But the inmate has become a model prisoner and unless the doctor can convince officials that he s dangerous he ll soon be back on the street. *1963: Actor Lilies of the Field; 2001: Honorary AwardFormat: DVD MOVIE Genre: ACTION/ADVENTURE Rating: NR UPC: 027616901491 Manufacturer No: M110053 Product Description

A TRIP INTO THE MIND OF A PSYCHOPATH!

I had heard many good things about this "explosive and provocative drama", so I decided to check this film out. While the performances are very good and story is interesting, this film about racism and psychological analysis is a bit dated. The artsy camerawork was probably something in it's day, but I found myself getting bored with some of the stagey tactics and monotonous screenplay. The DVD has a good transfer, but I found the audio to have a low bass flutter, making the voices a chore to hear.......this may have instigated my boredom. August 29, 2008

Lost Classic's Handling of Racism is Sadly Still Relevant Today

Bobby Darin holds his own against the great Sidney Poitier in an intense psychological duel between a black prison psychiatrist and a charismatic, white supremacist patient angling for parole. Even as he helps Darin conquer his personal demons, Poitier realizes that his patient remains an unrepentant threat to society. Worse, he finds that Darin has fooled the rest of the staff into believing he has reformed. Darin cunningly taunts Poitier by explaining how easily the visceral appeal of his "cause" is spread to those inclined to hate and blame minorities for their problems. The doctor's restraint, intelligence, and ultimate effectiveness in helping his patient wins the latter's apparent personal admiration but does not change said patient's overall racist beliefs.

For brevity I keep citing the actors but of course the credit belongs as well to screenwriters Hubert Cornfield and S. Lee Peterson. Cornfield, who also directed, contributes an audio commentary that is sadly all but unlistenable due to his obvious ill health. I would have liked to learn how the two actors got along during filming, but I just couldn't get through more than a few minutes of the commentary.

Peter Falk appears briefly at the beginning and end of "Pressure Point," but a far more impressive supporting role is that of young Barry Gordon as the childhood version of the Darin character's psycho-in-training.

I highly recommend this to fans of Poitier and Darin, as well as to anyone with the stomach for a deeper-than-usual examination of the unfortunate (and unfortunately continuing) appeal--to some--of white supremacist movements.

August 17, 2008

A Well-Shrunken Head

This is a truly excellent & powerful film that portrays the tense therapeutic relationship between a prison psychiatrist (Poitier) and a self-exalted American Nazi upstart (Darrin). Although incarcerated for sedition, Darrin's real imprisonment is within his own mind and persecutory complexes. and he suffers agonizing panic attacks, which results in his having to submit to therapy at the hands of someone he considers his inferior. He learns that his terrors are really the eruption of PTSD symptoms, and that his whole enterprise of hatred is a compensatory mask covering his deeper feelings of rage and inferioriy. Does this knowledge change him, however? To answer that question, you'll need--and want--to see the entire film and decide for yourself.

At the same time, this couch-opera is also an allegory about race relations, and perhaps about the spiritual battle between the forces of light/truth and darkness/deception--which is NOT protrayed lining up as Caucasian = light/truth and Black = darkness/deception, quite the opposite--even if one wants to be so literal about it. This film never takes the simple way out--it confronts unsavory hatred & bigotry, tackles some very subtle points about the process of psychotherapy, and portrays in painful detail the genesis (via graphic, bizarre parental abuse/neglect/cruelty) of a young man with an Antisocial Personality Disorder. Rather ambitious, I'd say!!

There are some pretty far-out special effects in this film, and even though perhaps crude by today's standards, they are still gripping and effective. As Darrin reluctantly unfolds his story in flashbacks, there are some excellent supporting performances by the actors portraying the parents and the Darrin-as-a-youngster character. Also, look for a young, earnest, sincerely befuddled, and non-trenchcoated Peter Falk in the framing story as a novice psychiatrist confessing his professional failures to the older, more experienced Poitier as his supervisor.

While I have not heard the commentary on the DVD, I can verify one other reviewer's surmise about director Kornfeld having medical problems and speaking through an electronic voice box. In the early 90's I saw Kornfeld speak at a showing of this film and 'Night of the Following Day' and while his remarks were hard to decipher, one could not help but admire his courage and erudition that shown through his handicap. He clearly had to struggle to make these dark, non-traditional films HIS way, and some pretty choice talent was happy to go along with him.

For clinical background contemporary to the making of this film, one might read texts such as 'The Authoritarian Personality' (Adorno, et.al.), Lindner's 'Fifty-Minute Hour' or perhaps John Bowlby's 'Forty-Four Juvenile Thieves' or Aichorn's 'Wayward Youth'. This was the heyday of psychoanalysis in the US, and there are really no punches pulled between the two stars as far as the therapeutic part of the film. Part of the film's achievement is that it closely follows clinical theory while remaining a piece of riveting, vital, and still-relevant entertainment. I think any thoughtful viewer will be quite enthralled with this hidden gem. March 25, 2008

Overheated Melodrama Deals with the Paranoid Delusions of a Truly Hateful Convict

Although the genesis of hate crimes is worthy of a film treatment, this heavy-handed 1962 melodrama is weighed down by too many theatrical flourishes to be as genuinely powerful as was once intended. Some critics at the time praised the bravery of such an undertaking, but one can see in hindsight how director Hubert Cornfield, who co-wrote the screenplay with Robert Lindner, doesn't seem to trust the basic material enough to provide a more straightforward telling of the case history of a psychopathic convict who hates non-Aryans with a virulent passion. To further depersonalize the plot, he doesn't even give the characters proper names. As a typically austere Stanley Kramer production, it has the earmarks of the high-minded social consciousness prevalent in the comparatively better films he made during this period - 1959's On the Beach about nuclear disarmament, 1961's Judgment at Nuremberg about the Nazi atrocities and 1963's A Child Is Waiting about mental retardation.

As a framing device for the central story, a chief psychiatrist is confronted by a frustrated staff doctor threatening to resign due to the seeming hopelessness of getting through to an anti-white black patient. Hoping to convince the younger doctor not to give up, the psychiatrist - who happens to be black - flashes back to a similarly difficult case he handled during WWII when he was forced to treat a Nazi supporter who was in jail for sedition. The convict is a vicious racist and anti-Semitic, who is suffering from a sleep disorder and blackouts. The bulk of the movie is the dialogue between the two over the course of the convict's three-year sentence. What emerges is a portrait of a pathetic man who had a miserable childhood that led to random acts of sadism and ultimately his membership in the American Nazi (Bund) party.

Fantasy sequences and documentary footage are liberally used to emphasize the convict's malignant nature with melodramatic excess. The film's turning point is the decision to release the unrepentant convict, which pits the heretofore becalmed psychiatrist against the prison authorities convinced he should be paroled. As late as this comes in the movie, it's the only point where Sidney Poitier's performance as the psychiatrist comes alive. In fact, his fury is so characteristically electrifying that he replicated the scene on a more subtle level in the father-son showdown in Kramer's later Guess Who's Coming to Dinner. As the convict, Bobby Darin gets the showier role, and while he is up to the challenge, he doesn't transcend it either. Peter Falk shows up briefly in the present-day scenes, while Carl Benton Reid adds some dimension to his small role as the chief medical officer. It all ends anti-climactically. The 2004 DVD offers no significant extras. March 17, 2008

Forgotten Powerful Film

I saw this film in the 1970s and was totally drawn into the psycho-drama of its storyline. A recent viewing took nothing away from its strange power. Bobby Darin's excellent performance gives evidence to the unrealized potential of a long movie career. In my recent viewing, Darin's character reminded me of Lee Harvey Oswald. "Pressure Point" is told in a very unsensational manner which adds to its power. This manner lends added potency to the film's very disturbing bar scene, where Darin's character and a buddy matter-of-factly humiliate a woman. "Pressure Point" is a very successful film about a very disturbed mind. January 29, 2008

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