John Huston, Freudian

Huston’s Freudian preoccupations assume different forms each time out, befitting his roving sensibility. Let There Be Light is a remarkable twentieth-century “miracle play,” replacing saintly healers with psychiatrists. Huston set up three cameras to cover intake interviews between patients and psychiatrists at Mason General Hospital on Long Island. The Army doctors set a brisk, compassionate tone as the veterans bare their souls. Huston concentrates on figures who seem to deepen as the film goes on. Notable among them is a courtly Black soldier subject to uncontrollable crying jags. He tells his psychiatrist that seeing his sweetheart’s photo triggers tears because she alone gave him “a sense of importance.” In group therapy, he says his proper middle-class parents tried to impose that sense of importance by forbidding him from socializing with anyone they considered lower class. Huston grasps every implication, creating an ineradicable impression of the psychological pressures of social strata in Black America—and maybe all America.

Master shrink/hypnotherapist Colonel Benjamin Simon rivets his patients’ attention with his incisive demeanor even before he puts them under his spell. It’s thrilling to see him heal paralysis, stuttering, and amnesia with the power of suggestion. The movie states that Mason General’s program for “battle casualties . . . of a neuro-psychiatric nature” was not a wonder cure for “peacetime neuroses which are usually of a chronic nature.” Huston wrote in his memoir An Open Book (1980) that the men “were put back on their legs again—which was a wonder and a miracle as far as I was concerned.”

Freud is a Gothic detective story. Huston pioneered the conceit of Freud as a sleuth who walks the mean streets of the mind to crack the mysteries of neurosis. The film homes in on the period between 1885 and 1890, when Freud forsakes traditional research to investigate “nervous disorders.” He hopes to cure others and himself, especially after his father’s death precipitates an abrupt collapse. He learns to interpret dreams that link seemingly distant or disparate experiences and verbal clues that disclose rifts in the warp and woof of everyday life. Montgomery Clift’s otherworldly aura as Freud—Huston wrote in the New York Times that Clift’s “startling eyes have the air of seeing more than do ordinary eyes”—add to the film’s shock and awe.

When Freud unravels the Oedipus complex, audiences can appreciate the tenebrous poetry of his vision, even if they might not agree that children compete with same-sex parents for the love of opposite-sex parents. Huston’s sophistication and lyricism transform clinical content into tragicomedy. When Susannah York—playing Cecily Koertner, a composite of several female patients—confuses “Protestant” and “prostitute,” we chuckle at the creation of the Freudian slip.

At twenty-three, York radiates ardent adolescent emotions. She and David McCallum, as an Oedipal sufferer in extremis, help Huston reanimate scary-movie tropes such as an enigmatic doll and an unclothed tailor’s dummy. Huston’s psychic jolts rival Ingmar Bergman’s. Along with cinematographer Douglas Slocombe, he devised a bleached-out chiaroscuro that turns a cemetery gate into a spine-tingling portent. Huston and Slocombe shoot Cecily’s false memory of her father’s corpse in a Naples hospital through a glass plate that bends the outlines of objects and people, fuzzies their forms and faces, and haloes Cecily’s stricken visage in diffused light. As Freud prods Cecily to confront reality, Huston cuts from “doctors” to Carabinieri, from “nurses” to sex workers, then sharpens focus to detail the bawdy finery of a brothel. Cecily recoils from her breakthrough but ultimately achieves an exhilarating catharsis. In Huston’s film, as in Auden’s poem “In Memory of Sigmund Freud,” the father of psychoanalysis descends to “the lost people like Dante” but encourages us “to be enthusiastic over the night, / not only for the sense of wonder / it alone has to offer, but also / because it needs our love.”

From miracle play to mystery to trance: Huston’s Reflections in a Golden Eye puts anyone susceptible to McCullers’s vision into a hypnotic state. The author called her outlook the American Southern version of Russian realism: “a bold and outwardly callous juxtaposition of the tragic with the humorous, the immense with the trivial, the sacred with the bawdy, the whole soul of a man with a materialistic detail.” In Reflections, she saturates that robust aesthetic with insights about voyeurism, fetishism, and sadomasochism.

Huston embraces the outré without blinking, designing action that is visceral, penetrating, and poetic. He introduces his pivotal character, Brando’s Major Weldon Penderton, as he lifts weights and eyeballs his body in the mirror. The movie elicits gasps, laughs, and pangs of recognition as Brando unveils this repressed homosexual’s throttled id, obsessive ego, and dominating superego, riddled with textbook ideals of military life and leadership.

In the regimented setting of a peacetime Southern fort, Huston traces a booby-trapped parabola that ensnares (as McCullers puts it) “two officers, a soldier, two women, a Filipino and a horse.” Penderton’s lusty wife, Leonora (Elizabeth Taylor), has an affair with bluff Lieutenant Colonel Morris Langdon (Brian Keith). He’s married to supersensitive Alison (Julie Harris), who is depressed by the death of her only child in infancy and her own act of self-mutilation. The Langdons’ fanciful Filipino houseboy, Anacleto (Zorro David), doubles as her caregiver. The “soldier,” enigmatic Private Elgee Williams (Robert Forster), tends the “horse,” Firebird, Leonora’s feisty white stallion. Williams fixates on Leonora after he sees her nude. Penderton stalks Williams after seeing him ride naked on a horse. A sound sleeper, Leonora doesn’t stir when Williams sneaks into her bedroom to stare at her and fondle her lingerie. A light sleeper, Alison sees Williams skulk out of the Pendertons’ home—they’re next-door neighbors—and presumes Leonora has betrayed both husbands.

Huston bathed the images in “a diffuse amber color” because anything more garish would obscure “a story of minds, thoughts, emotions.” Warner Bros. distributed Huston’s preferred desaturated prints only in major cities, then swapped even those few copies for ones in standard color. The director’s version, now playing on the Criterion Channel, manifests Huston’s synesthetic genius. Was he free-associating when he chose the word “amber”? His characters are “trapped in amber”—stuck in primal images and desires or relentless paradigms of martial and marital behavior. 

Huston’s coup de couleur conjures a world of idées fixes and fever dreams. It also showcases urgent and inspired acting. Forster supplies that creature of the id Elgee Williams with (in the novel’s words) “the strange rapt face of a Gauguin primitive.” Taylor imbues feather-brained belle Leonora with an instinctive spite inside her marriage and esprit and appetite outside of it. As Langdon, Keith is funny and semi-sympathetic as he takes macho Army-post normality to its wit’s end. Harris gives Alison quivering antennae that can decipher the Langdon and Penderton households until chaos agent Williams enters the picture. She summons a mournful humor when she scans her sanatorium’s dining room and comments, “Alcoholic. Senility. Paresis. Oh my god, what a choice crew.”

Best of all, Brando delivers an epiphany when the Major looks in a mirror (again) and tries out alternate identities—a masterly commander, a bon vivant. (This phenomenal strange interlude catalyzed the “You talkin’ to me?” scene in Taxi Driver.) And Brando is unexpectedly touching when Penderton realizes how wrong it is for “a square peg to keep scraping about in a round hole rather than to discover and use the unorthodox one that would fit it.” Partly because of these “beautiful performances,” Huston in An Open Book rates Reflections as “one of my best pictures . . . Scene by scene—in my humble estimation—it is pretty hard to fault.”

Huston’s mesmerizing Freudian trio testifies to his enduring fascination with the primal demons and marvels that lie beneath the conscious mind. Even in his most extroverted films, he would dig for behavior that transcends mere “personality,” like Bogart’s greedy gold-seeker Fred C. Dobbs in Sierra Madre rocking on his haunches and laughing manically as he sinks into monomania, or Edward G. Robinson’s crime lord Johnny Rocco in Key Largo (1948) exuding imperial arrogance as he smokes a cigar while soaking in a tub. In Let There Be Light, Freud, and Reflections in a Golden Eye, Huston put his expansive gifts strictly at the service of revelation. These films enhance our understanding of his uncanny intuition.