Freud: The Secret Passion
In this 1962 bio-pic, John Huston lucidly conjures the revolution that occurred in the drawing rooms and medical offices of fin-de-siècle Vienna. The profound script—which Huston commissioned from Jean-Paul Sartre, who insisted on remaining uncredited after its revision by Charles Kaufman and Wolfgang Reinhardt—brings to life the discovery of such psychological concepts as unconscious desires, the interpretation of dreams, the free-association method, transference, and, of course, the Freudian slip, but reserves the greatest drama for the notion of childhood sexuality and the Oedipus complex. Montgomery Clift burns with a fierce intelligence as the young practitioner with a titanic imagination, and Susannah York, as Cecily Koertner, his most troubling neurotic, movingly conveys the tormenting price of self-knowledge. While in different hands (Orson Welles’s, for instance) these radical themes could have inspired more hallucinatory, probing, and inward images, Huston nonetheless evokes an apt sense of wonder, admiration, and awe.(Metrograph, Dec. 14)