Dream imagery rarely works in movies.  It is one thing to have a dreamlike moment and another to try to actually convey realistically what it is like to experience a dream.  Something always comes across as artificial about the experience, even when the collaborators are Dali and Hitchcock for 1945’s Spellbound.  But I’m going to be talking about 1948 b-movie The Dark Past, and it ain’t Hitchcock.

Psychologist Lee J. Cobb is trying to get the root of William Holden’s problems, and that is through interpretation of a dream the man keeps having.  We will see the imagery in negative, which is about the cheapest manner one can skew footage to make it otherworldly.  Holden is unable to escape a rainstorm, no matter where he runs.  Then he is under an umbrella, except there is a hole in it.  Apparently, the rain hurts his hand when he tries to block the hole.  Then he is surrounded by bars, like he’s in jail.

The interpretation of that last part would appear pretty obvious, as he has escaped from prison.  He and his gang have taken Cobb, his family and their friends hostage at Cobb’s cozy little mountain retreat.  I can’t imagine what it is like to try to psychoanalyze somebody under those conditions, but Cobb remains cool as a cucumber.  I now wonder if any therapists I have worked with in the past have felt like they being hostage when having to deal with me.

This very talky noir is like a two-man play, a battle pitting an analytical and patient mind against a manic force of chaos.  Holden has already killed the warden his gang abducted.  He also has wounded Steven Geray, a fellow professor who made the mistake of dropping by.  Geray could tell something was wrong from the way people were standing around in an unnatural arrangement in the living room.  I was amused such an awkward arrangement never fails to be the result of telling a group of people to act naturally.

Fellow captives include future Ms. Moneypenny, Lois Maxwell, as Cobb’s wife, and Robert Hyatt as his son.  The thugs include Berry Kroeger and Robert Osterloh, because these are the roles they perfected in so many pictures like this.  Nina Foch is Holden’s girl, and she’s more faithful than Adele Jurgens is to husband Wilton Graff.  Those two are guests of Cobb.  Jurgens is having a fling with another guest, Stephen Dunne.   

There’s also Kathryn Card and Ellen Corby as the household staff.  They end up tied to posts in the basement.  Corby is useless, loudly wailing with terror through most of her screentime.  Card has some fight in her, or at least mouths off.  Foch tells her, “Don’t make me gag you.  It doesn’t taste good.” and I wondered if she knew that from experience.  Nobody else does much to try to fight the intruders, except Hyatt, who makes a valiant attempt to escape out a window. 

Like many noirs, this is told in flashback, and I was amused by the idea Cobb is telling detective Robert B. Williams every detail of this for at least an hour.  The film opens in a peculiar manner, as it is shot from the first-person perspective of Cobb arriving for work at the police station, where he is employed as a criminal psychologist.  The reason Cobb tells this lengthy anecdote is to prove people can change, and he hopes he might intervene with a young thug he just saw in the lineup.  I can’t believe the script actually has this exchange between Cobb and Williams as regards the kid: “I’m interested in that boy.”  “You and me both.”  Surely those lines had to scan as peculiar in any era.

Another odd aspect of the film is the two-story set that is Cobb’s mountain cabin.  I swear it is the same used for a similar locale in 1947 noir Framed, only reconfigured.  Both movies were made by Columbia, so I assume they reused set components between pictures.  For all I know, elements of it might have been used in several of their films.

The Dark Past is lacking, with long stretches of the Cliff Notes kind of movie psychology which is too dull to keep my interest and too simplistic to be convincing.  There’s even a physical manifestation of Holden’s despair, his torment making the fingers on his left hand contort as if he’s trying to make the devil horns gesture.  When he is suddenly cured in this very short therapy session, those fingers uncurl and my eyes rolled.  As for myself, I think Holden’s inner child just wanted to rock out.  So, rock on, William Holden, rock on.

Dir: Rudolph Maté

Starring William Holden, Nina Foch, Lee J. Cobb

Watched as part of the Powerhouse/Indicator blu-ray (region B) box set Columbia Noir #3