The 1940s saw a number of popularizations of psychoanlysis in Hollywood. Most famously, there’s Hitchcock’s Spellbound, but Lang’s Secret Beyond the Door mined similar territory within the women’s gothic. Home of the Brave propped up its problem film drama with a psychoanalytic explanation of racism. There was even a psychoanalysis-themed musical, Lady in the Dark, with Ginger Rogers (which I’m dying to see).
Before chalking off the decade to deference to pscyhoanalytic authority, however, you should see 20th Century-Fox’s 1947 noir, Nightmare Alley. One part low-life carnival noir, it eventually shifts gears to track the cons of Tyrone Power/Stanton, as he gets in league with a psychoanalyst to swindle money from the rich. The film is surprisingly cynical and relentless in its equation of mental science with mentalism.
And fun, too. Like Lang’s film, Nightmare Alley manages to infuse questions of the psyche with the frisson of the gothic and the supernatural.
No comments have been added to this post yet.