The Dark Past

Today Athens and I watched a sort of Freudian take on
The Desperate Hours, with Lee J. Cobb as a psychology professor and William Holden as the fugitive convict holding Cobb, his family, and their weekend guests hostage. Cobb comes to realize that if he can just unlock the secret of Holden's recurring nightmares, then--then--well, it's unclear what he hopes to accomplish, actually. But they spend several not particularly desperate hours free associating, playing chess, and throwing darts before solving the riddle. Holden has his breakthrough as the cops arrive to surround the house--he finds he doesn't have it in him to shoot his way to freedom anymore. "Al Walker never killed anyone again," Prof. Cobb relates to the cop who's been listening to his story. I should hope not! Presumably he went to the chair.

Since Al Walker and his gang don't turn out to be that threatening, and Walker's neuroses are pretty thin stuff, The Dark Past is mostly devoid of dramatic interest. It's 75 mins long but still feels slack--a subplot about Cobbs's visitng friends, a married couple and the wife's lover, that goes nowhere. It kind of reminded me and Athens of a training film for forensic psychologists: Cobb is ostensibly telling the story to explain how he came to work for the police, but the movie doesn't bother to stick to his point of view. Our favorite part has Walker's moll, played by Nina Foch, describe Walker's recurring nightmare, which we the audience get to see in a sort of expressionistic, reverse negative style. So we get to see a dream described by somebody who didn't have it, in a story being told by a third person.

One other moment I'd like to mention: early on we see a night's arrests being lined up in front of an entire police squad, and one by one the crooks (which of course they are--nobody innocent is going to get hauled in) stand in front of a microphone and our interviewed about their crime, record, etc. Another movie in the Athens film series, The Sniper (dir. Edward Dmytryk), had a similar scene, where some usual-suspect sex offenders were paraded before a detective squadron and grilled embarrassingly. I think if I were a policeman, this would probably be the best part of my day, and I'd be as proud as a parent at a Christmas pagaent when my collar stepped up to the mic. I'm guessing that some unfortunate Supreme Court challenge put an end to this showy procedure.