StyleSk8r
At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.
bkoganbing
When I wrote a review of the remake of Blind Alley that starred William Holden I had not yet seen this nor had investigated the Broadway play from where this film came from. I've come to some interesting conclusions as a result.Chester Morris plays the killer role in Blind Alley which is a combination of The Petrified Forest and The Desperate Hours and the viewer will recognize parts of both those classics. Morris and his gang are on the run having just busted out of prison where they took the warden hostage and Morris kills him. He then takes refuge at the lakeside home of Ralph Bellamy and wife Rose Stradner who happen to be entertaining guests at the time.Bellamy is a psychiatrist who teaches and after Morris coldbloodedly murders Stanley Brown one of his students he thinks the only way to save his and everyone else's lives is to get into his head. Bellamy is a cool customer doing this, especially with friends and family's lives at stake. When Lee J. Cobb played the part of the psychiatrist in The Dark Past he was detached almost clinical in the way he probed at Holden. Bellamy is not looking at this as an experiment and now having seen both films I can say Bellamy's interpretation was superior.Blind Alley originated as a play on Broadway by James Warwick with a 119 performance run in the 1935-36 season. Looking at that cast I saw that George Coulouris played the psychiatrist and this is one instance where we are so unfortunate that he did not do either movie version. Coulouris would really have been special in the part.This film is a real sleeper from Columbia Pictures, don't miss it if ever broadcast again.
LCShackley
This thriller isn't a bad way to spend 69 minutes, thanks to some decent acting, a good supporting cast of character players, and fast pacing. But the novelty of psychoanalysis-as-solution has worn off after 70 years, and most modern audiences have heard the "blame the parents" ploy so often that it seems hackneyed. The director includes some special effects which also might have seemed novel at the time but now seem amateurish.Ralph Bellamy plays a teacher of psychoanalysis who has to put his theories to work on a mad killer who has decided to use the prof's country house as a temporary hideaway. Chester Morris is the trigger-happy escaped con in a part that would have been more compelling with Cagney or Bogie in the role. This adapted play is stage-bound but keeps enough interest going to make you stay put for the explosive ending.Watch for John "Perry White" Hamilton in a very small, non-speaking part.
whpratt1
Enjoyed this film starring Chester Morris, (Hal Wilson) who has escaped from a prison along with a group of criminals with him. Hal finds a home which is near water where he can make his escape by boat and takes over a home of Dr. Shelby, (Ralph Bellamy) who is a college professor and also a psychiatrist. Dr. Shelby has a house full of guests, his wife and young son and the home becomes one big nightmare for everyone. Shelby tries to calm Hal Wilson and decides to try and solve his mental problems because Hal has killed one person in his house and is capable of killing everyone in the house. The entire household is struggling to keep calm and at the same time try to keep alive. Great Classic 1939 film with all great veteran actors. Enjoy.
Robert J. Maxwell
A couple of gangsters, led by Chester Morris and his moll, Anne Dvorak, invade the very proper and bourgeois vacation lodge of psychiatrist Ralph Bellamy and his guests, and they take the place over while waiting either for a chance to escape or a chance to shoot it out with the cops.I'll tell you something. Chester Morris couldn't have stumbled into a wronger place. The tweedy, pipe-smoking, unflappable Ralph Bellamy pegs Morris immediately as a Freudian delight. To pass the hours away, between chess games, Bellamy beings to probe Morris, gently. Why, for instance, does Morris have those hysterically paralyzed fingers? Why does he have that recurring dream about rain dripping through the hole in his umbrella? At first, Morris reacts irritably to all this "screwy" stuff. "You're screwy!", he tells Bellamy. Everything Morris, in his ne plus ultra gangsta mode, does not understand, he calls "screwy." That renders just about everything in Bellamy's greater vicinity "screwy" because Morris understands nothing of what's going on.Bellamy helpfully draws him a sort of a cartoon, illustrating the mind, according to the received wisdom of 1939. You see, this is the inside of your head. And up here is the conscious mind -- everything you know about. But down here is what we call the unconscious, the bad stuff that the conscious mind wants to forget about. There's a guardian that keeps the unconscious down where it belongs, called "the censor band." But -- are you taking notes? -- but sometimes the censor weakens, as when we fall asleep, and some of the unconscious memories and desires can creep out in disguised form and show up in our dreams. Or sometimes the forbidden memories take the form of physical symptoms, such as paralyzed hands or fingers. The wind up is that Chester Morris is cured in sixty-nine minutes by Ralph Bellamy. He'll never shoot another gun.Actually, Bellamy's explanation of psychoanalysis according to Freud isn't badly presented. I'm glad he stuck with Freud and only two levels of consciousness. If he had ever gotten into Carl Jung, who split up the personality into so many overlapping and contradictory parts that they could have spread out and still filled up the heads of a dozen ordinary neurotics -- well, the audience would have been afloat in a world of some sticky dualistic excreta.At that, though, the movie was probably interesting and educational in 1939, the year of Freud's death. Psychoanalysis was about at its peak and there may have been a certain public curiosity about just what was going on. This answers the question, though it does so in the same way that the Catholic catechism explains the mysteries of the world. "Who made the world?" "Freud made the world." A bit more than a decade later, it was remade almost shot-for-shot as the noir-sounding "The Dark Past," with William Holden running around and calling everybody "screwy." Holden is a more versatile actor than Chester Morris, but this role is so stereotyped that Morris and his clipped sneer are preferable. Still, it's of interest in reflecting certain interests, not just of 1939 or 1950, but of more enduring value. After all, Freud practically invented the subconscious single-handed, and without our grasp of psychodynamics, would we have the efficient marketing we have today of Viagra and SUVs and politicians?
