I'll give this to John Huston: he liked to experiment from time to time at levels that Hitchcock enjoyed. What Huston seems to have wanted to do when he set out to make this curious biopic of Sigmund Freud's life and work was to make something more surreal and dreamlike than a typical film, and that's where it is most interesting. In terms of actually connecting emotionally, I find the mechanics of the film unnatural and clanky, a natural outgrowth of heavy reliance on Freudian analysis as the dramatic driver (I had similar complaints about Spellbound).
Sigmund Freud (Montgomery Clift) is a young medical student in Vienna who runs against the common practices of the time as exemplified by the head of the hospital Theodore Meynert (Eric Portman), especially around a woman Freud says is suffering from hysteria which Meynert disagrees with. He goes to Paris to study under Dr. Jean-Martin Charcot (Fernand Ledoux), using hypnosis to get people to uncover mental blocks that manifest in physical behavior like shakes and self-imposes paralysis. There, Freud meets Josef Breuer (Larry Parks) with whom he develops a professional relationship to dig deeper into the subconscious.
Now, the whole fascination with Freudian analysis by people like Huston and Hitchcock has always felt...odd to me. The opening narration (by Huston) is all about how the birth of psychoanalysis is one of the three greatest moments of self-discovery in human history. The other two are the heliocentric model of the solar system and evolution. They loved this stuff, and yet, Huston was still a drunk who shot big game (while making movies about how big game hunting is bad), and womanized all over the place. Any psychoanalysis didn't seem to do much in terms of altering any of his behavior. I do not understand their awe with which they view this series of questioning until you come up with a hidden memory that is supposed to sudden fix everything in the person's life. It feels like magic...oh wait. I get it now.
Anyway, that's how it always plays out as I watch these sorts of movies. The brave doctor asks a series of questions, set to increasingly dramatic music, until the patient opens their eyes wide and discovers a hidden memory and their lives are all better. Now, I won't say that Freud actually does that, because the film doesn't. What it does do is track, off and on, Freud's treatment of Cecily (Susannah York) (loosely based on a real patient) as Freud works deeper into his theories, modifying things as Cecily and even himself have experiences that contradict his theories, requiring further refinement.
The full dramatic turn is around Freud's embrace of childhood sexuality since his theories that sex is the basis of all neuroses can't hold up to the evidence that inciting events happened before sexual awakening. So, instead of saying that his theory is dumb and stupid, he just digs deeper until he makes the conclusion that children want to sleep with their parents of the opposite sex and kill the parents of the same sex (the Oedipal and Electra complexes onset from birth, essentially). It's presented as a controversial idea that drives Breuer away from Freud after having successfully saved his career at one point, and the finale of the film is Freud triumphantly, and to much booing from his peers, presenting his theories to the rest of the doctors, essentially painting him as a martyr (he would live for decades longer, of course).
The story itself is...weird, especially in the light that Freudian analysis is largely considered a fossil of psychology that no longer applies anymore. At the most forgiving, one could say that Freud laid groundwork that later psychologists would build off of, but his child sexuality stuff was not any of that, and ending it on that note is weird, to say the least. On top of it all, performances are largely stilted, Clift putting in a restrained buy largely unremarkable central performance as well, focusing on trying to make a clinical film instead of a highly emotional one.
If it were just the straight story of Freud's early career, I'd be far less sanguine on the film overall. However, what I end up finding most interesting is the surrealistic sequences (helped in no small part by the early score from Jerry Goldsmith) that cover Huston's early narration and a few dreams that do actually feel like dreams (movie dreams that don't feel like dreams bug me). These are bravura sequences that stand apart from the rest of the film as very interesting exercises in borderline experimental cinematic language. I wouldn't go so far as to say that it saves the film, but it takes a middling, kind of weird hagiography of a celebrity psychoanalyst and makes it more interesting than it has any other right of being.
Huston was obviously trying something here, but I don't think he gave the kinds of things he wasn't experimenting with the kind of attention necessary to make it work. Throw in the fact that he was obviously completely enamored of Freudian analysis itself, and you've got what essentially amounts to a secular saint in his mind that he could never stand against.
Eh. It's more interesting than it deserves.
Sigmund Freud (Montgomery Clift) is a young medical student in Vienna who runs against the common practices of the time as exemplified by the head of the hospital Theodore Meynert (Eric Portman), especially around a woman Freud says is suffering from hysteria which Meynert disagrees with. He goes to Paris to study under Dr. Jean-Martin Charcot (Fernand Ledoux), using hypnosis to get people to uncover mental blocks that manifest in physical behavior like shakes and self-imposes paralysis. There, Freud meets Josef Breuer (Larry Parks) with whom he develops a professional relationship to dig deeper into the subconscious.
Now, the whole fascination with Freudian analysis by people like Huston and Hitchcock has always felt...odd to me. The opening narration (by Huston) is all about how the birth of psychoanalysis is one of the three greatest moments of self-discovery in human history. The other two are the heliocentric model of the solar system and evolution. They loved this stuff, and yet, Huston was still a drunk who shot big game (while making movies about how big game hunting is bad), and womanized all over the place. Any psychoanalysis didn't seem to do much in terms of altering any of his behavior. I do not understand their awe with which they view this series of questioning until you come up with a hidden memory that is supposed to sudden fix everything in the person's life. It feels like magic...oh wait. I get it now.
Anyway, that's how it always plays out as I watch these sorts of movies. The brave doctor asks a series of questions, set to increasingly dramatic music, until the patient opens their eyes wide and discovers a hidden memory and their lives are all better. Now, I won't say that Freud actually does that, because the film doesn't. What it does do is track, off and on, Freud's treatment of Cecily (Susannah York) (loosely based on a real patient) as Freud works deeper into his theories, modifying things as Cecily and even himself have experiences that contradict his theories, requiring further refinement.
The full dramatic turn is around Freud's embrace of childhood sexuality since his theories that sex is the basis of all neuroses can't hold up to the evidence that inciting events happened before sexual awakening. So, instead of saying that his theory is dumb and stupid, he just digs deeper until he makes the conclusion that children want to sleep with their parents of the opposite sex and kill the parents of the same sex (the Oedipal and Electra complexes onset from birth, essentially). It's presented as a controversial idea that drives Breuer away from Freud after having successfully saved his career at one point, and the finale of the film is Freud triumphantly, and to much booing from his peers, presenting his theories to the rest of the doctors, essentially painting him as a martyr (he would live for decades longer, of course).
The story itself is...weird, especially in the light that Freudian analysis is largely considered a fossil of psychology that no longer applies anymore. At the most forgiving, one could say that Freud laid groundwork that later psychologists would build off of, but his child sexuality stuff was not any of that, and ending it on that note is weird, to say the least. On top of it all, performances are largely stilted, Clift putting in a restrained buy largely unremarkable central performance as well, focusing on trying to make a clinical film instead of a highly emotional one.
If it were just the straight story of Freud's early career, I'd be far less sanguine on the film overall. However, what I end up finding most interesting is the surrealistic sequences (helped in no small part by the early score from Jerry Goldsmith) that cover Huston's early narration and a few dreams that do actually feel like dreams (movie dreams that don't feel like dreams bug me). These are bravura sequences that stand apart from the rest of the film as very interesting exercises in borderline experimental cinematic language. I wouldn't go so far as to say that it saves the film, but it takes a middling, kind of weird hagiography of a celebrity psychoanalyst and makes it more interesting than it has any other right of being.
Huston was obviously trying something here, but I don't think he gave the kinds of things he wasn't experimenting with the kind of attention necessary to make it work. Throw in the fact that he was obviously completely enamored of Freudian analysis itself, and you've got what essentially amounts to a secular saint in his mind that he could never stand against.
Eh. It's more interesting than it deserves.