PRESSURE POINT

d. Hubert Cornfield (1962)

I've always loved films about psychoanalysis, mainly because they provide so much scope for offbeat and inventive attempts to turn the objective camera into a subjective eye. I particularly enjoy dream sequences, haunting visuals, unusual staging, blurred edges, atonal electronic music and lots and lots of mime. Pressure Point is almost mainstream in many ways, but has some fascinating components that keep it plenty weird enough for consideration on this somewhat specialist blog. 

The very great Sidney Poitier is the prison psychiatrist, Bobby Darin the prisoner patient, an American Nazi imprisoned when the USA entered the war with Germany. They are diametrically opposed from the outset, of course, but the tension between the racist loser and the black high flier sparks some soul searching from each of them, which makes for a fascinating conflict. 

Their sessions together open up all sorts of odd, abstract flashbacks from Darin's less than illustrious past, sometimes staged in anonymous dreamscapes (the scenes where a young Darin bullies his imaginary friend), sometimes in Poitier's office (the venue for a fantasy about Darin ordering an elephant to stand on his pathetic hypochondriac Mother's head). It's pretty intense, particularly the restaging of a unsettling incident in which Darin and his drunken friends play Noughts and Crosses on every available surface in a bar - including the landlord's wife.   

Although the narrative is framed as a fairly conventional tale of triumph over adversity, Pressure Point does a lot more besides, riveting the attention and stimulating the imagination, and the performances, particularly from the under-rated Darin, are excellent. 

THE COUCH

d. Owen Crump (1962)

Charles Campbell (Grant Williams) has issues: he's a thief and a fantasist with delusions of grandeur; he's choking with anger and sexual rage; he pretends that his hated dead father is alive, and his beloved alive sister is dead, and, every night at seven pm, he goes into the busy streets of the city and stabs a stranger to death with an ice pick. He's also in love with his psychiatrist's niece and, god help her, she feels the same way about him.

Nearly noir, nowhere near normal, most of the action takes place in public places rendered desolate and full of shadows: out of hours offices, a lonely spot overlooking the neon lit city, the busy streets at night where thousands of people walk shoulder to shoulder and fail to notice one another. No wonder some of them go a little crazy although, to be fair, our protagonist takes it as far as he can without actually falling off the edge of the planet.  

Grant Williams is a favourite actor of mine. He's somewhere between a matinee idol and a method actor, although he has a curiously pitted face, and his skin looks like a sheet of low density sandpaper. Williams plays the psycho killer as charming and weird, managing to keep his character constantly off beam but without ever rolling his eyes, gnashing his teeth and playing the obvious villain. You even feel sorry for him. When he hears something he doesn't like he shoves his fist in his mouth and bites down on it, a fairly standard bit of dramatic business apart from the fact that, when you see his hand a little later, he has actual bite marks on his knuckles. It's not necessarily acting, but it is impressive.

THE MASK

d. Julian Roffman (1961)

Psychiatrist Allen Barnes has a patient who has stolen an ancient tribal mask from an University archive. It’s a chilling, horrible artefact, a crystalline skull with beady eyes and a hinged lantern jaw with jagged teeth, the sort of thing that looks like it should be encrusted in blood. The young man has become addicted to putting on the mask and experiencing an altered state, a sort of parallel dimension full of danger and horror. When he removes the mask, he feels the overwhelming urge to kill*.

Falling apart, the young man commits suicide, first posting the mask to Dr Barnes. Barnes, a rationalist and seeker of truth, cannot resist the temptation to put the mask on himself. What happens next is a form of Hell, as the psychiatrist sees the same terrible visions as his patient, undergoes the same ordeal, feels the same urges – and, almost instantly, begins to go completely insane.

A tremendous, supremely leftfield film, The Mask is good throughout but superlative in its four surreal 3D sequences. These nightmarish scenes have an extraordinary primal power: savage, pagan, occult, violent, disturbing and discombobulating. I've watched them with the glasses on and off and, actually, prefer the blurred reds and blues of the unprocessed image. The scenes are accompanied by the swoops and bleeps of an analogue electronic score and are absolutely outstanding, perhaps the best use of 3D ever.

On the film’s release, the audience were given a ‘magic, mystic mask’, a shaped set of 3D glasses. When a voice from the screen demanded ‘Put the mask on, NOW!’ they would don the glasses and enter the warped fantasy at the same time as the increasingly frazzled hero. My God, how I wish I’d been there.

* So many psychotronic films hinge on ‘the urge to kill’ that, in real life, the human race should technically have all been murdered long ago.