Cinema
Limits of Normality
By ISABEL QUIGLY sensational than the other, and pointing no par- ticular moral except the moral of humanity.
No one is going to suggest, thank heaven, that anyone should see it for strictly practical reasons (as people suggested that little girls should be shown the earlier film as a warning against friendly old gentlemen); but it wouldn't hurt any- one who grunts and rumbles at the thought of sexual aberration to sec its psychiatrist at work discovering- or suggesting, rather—the reasons for it, or the mad disgust and fear of ordinary people faced with it in someone they know and even love. I suppose the film's most harrowingly intentioned moment (and, surprisingly, it comes off) is when Ruth, having accepted, forgiven, understood everything in the man she loves, secs her small daughter rush up to hug him and screams: 'Stop.' It is the sort of shock the cinema can give as nothing else can. (Incidentally the similarity of the circumstances to Humbert's gives an added point: has Ruth, widow with a pretty young daughter, courted by the man with
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a penchant for small girls, read her Lolita, do you suppose?) The Celluloid Psychiatrist is one of those characters (like the Sheriff, or the Teenage Were- wolf, or the Boy Hero's Dog) long familiar to filmgoers. He looks like (say) Herbert Lom in The Seventh Veil and has a capacious bag of tricks called the subconscious into which he takes us for flashback dives. There we plunge into surprises like schoolroom rape or cannibalism, and, after a few goes, out we come, exhausted but triumphant, with an abrupt solution; then radiant smiles, clinches, 'normality': Freud's in his heaven, all's right with the flicks, how restful and reassuring! Now The Mark is as far re- moved from that as the average fictional teenage werewolf is from Holden Caulfield, and if we ever see a film psychiatrist in action so convinc- ingly, so deftly yet—in a sense—so explicitly, I shall be surprised. It doesn't sound too promising to say that we keep having flashbacks within flashbacks: i.e., hero in the present remembers his 'group therapy' sessions in prison and, through them, what he remembered there; but the result is convincing. For one thing, the psychiatrist is no smug know-all, but human, fallible, a suggester, purposefully non-advisory, not a wise setter-on-life's-path. And so what he does isn't explaining so much as interpreting, clarifying; and, with no hard line between 'ill' and 'well,' normar and 'abnormal,' puts things, not into amoral woolliness but into a kind of charitable perspective.
A lot of the credit (apart from an admirable script) must go to Rod Steiger's playing and personality as Dr. McNally, the psychiatrist with —while he is treating others--pre-matrimonial nerves himself. I've thought Mr. Steiger atroc- iously mannered in the past, but here he hits the part off beautifully: kind without cosiness, tough without truculence, intelligent, and humble above all, and quite without the psychiatric air--broody, velvet-eyed, purring—usually affected on the screen. His dives into the sick man's past are made with skill and delicacy: can you imagine, for instance, putting the CEdipus complex into visual terms in the person of a child of five and his parents, and bringing it off? Unfortunately, though, the film cheats (is it censorship or too much sympathy?) by making the man not really guilty in the first place. He has spent three years in gaol, but only, it turns out, for taking a child for a drive and being met by the angry neigh- bours when he gets home again; not guilty of rape in fact, but only in intention (while the child cowers he is sick over a wall). This softens the effect of all his future actions and turns a credible situation into something of a conven- tionally filmish one, involving legal injustice in the first place.
Guy Green's direction gets over all sorts of problems of style and manages to be visually suggestive without being prurient, and most of the time to keep one's sympathy, one's humanity, where they ought to be. He is even able to give an impression of danger without sinisterness, of mental sickness without horror. In fact, few films could be less, in the strict sense, horrific than this one. My own reservation, when I saw the film, was that I was almost invariably irritated by both his hero and his heroine—Stuart Whit- man and Maria Schell, who contrived, as people, to bore and bother me and whose love I could hardly believe in, or at any rate believe that it mattered. Much more convincing were the smaller parts: Paul Rogers as the office rival, Brenda de Banzie as the landlady, Donald Houston as the loathsome reporter muck-raking 'in the public interest,' Donald WoIfit as the office boss.
I didn't for a moment believe in the hero's marvellous office efficiency, either, but that's a small point, like the terrible clothes they put on the heroine. Details apart, this is a satisfactory treatment of an almost untreatable theme, sincerely and, if you can believe me, even pleasantly done; and, in stressing the fact that we all have at least some of the 'abnormal,' or at least anti-social, impulses, and that being 'normal' just means managing to contain and order them, it takes away, as few things could--in its use of dreams especially—the barriers between people of varying mental states.
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