The Secret Passion

Montgomery Clift was honored in Summer Under the Stars, and one of his movies that I somehow neglected to DVR was the biopic Freud. Fortunately, it was on Watch TCM for a while, so I was able to watch it there before it expired and write up and schedule this post.

As you might guess, the movie is about Sigmund Freud, one of the key names in psychoanalysis, even if a lot of his ideas were oversimplified when he proposed them, simply because nobody else had proposed such ideas before and most theories wind up needing a fair bit of refinement. Freud, played here by Clift, had a long and complicated professional life -- much too long for one movie, in fact -- so the movie only deals with a decade or so in the early part of his career.

The movie opens in Vienna in 1885, where he's engaged to Martha (Susan Kohner), and working at a hospital under Dr. Meynert (a real person, played here by Eric Portman). However, the two doctors get involved in a professional dispute over the treatment of hysteria, a disorder which for a good portion of history was thought to be centered in the uterus ("hysterectomy" comes from the same Greek root). The dispute causes Freud to leave the hospital, delay his marriage to Martha, and go to Paris to study further.

In Paris, Freud studies under Jean-Martin Charcot (another real person who did research into several neurological conditions including ALS). At this point in his career Charcot was studying the possibility of treating hysteria through the use of hypnotherapy, a fairly radical idea at the time, and one which I think the movie treats rather too simplistically, as if you can just hypnotize someone by snapping your fingers. But the idea intrigues Freud, and he starts using hypnotherapy to try to treat some of the more unusual cases he encounters when he gets back to Vienna.

For better or worse, the cases Freud encounters all seem to involve odd sexual hangups. One, Cecily (Susannah York), is being treated by Freud's partner in practic Dr. Breuer (Larry Parks). Her father died in Naples and ever since then she's had partial paralysis and insomnia and a host of other problems. Worse, she starts showing an attraction to Dr. Breuer that results in his handing the case over to Sigmund. In turn, Cecily starts feeling attracted to Freud.

The other case involves young Carl (David McCallum) who describes some really weird dreams and an odd relationship with his parents, with the final result of the first session being that Carl tries making out with a dressing mannequin. Creepy stuff, and it starts giving Freud bad dreams of his own. Physician, heal thyself, some would say, but in a case like this Freud might want to try discussing his dreams with another professional.

However, in dealing with all these cases, Freud starts developing ideas about child sexuality and how not being able to deal with these childhood thoughts properly is one of the underlying causes of neuroses. It's a controversial idea, and needless to say when Freud tries to present it at a medical conference the other doctors are radically opposed to it because, as is also said, science advances one death at a time. Of course, Freud is a well-known and influential name today, so we know how his ideas eventually become a part of the public consciousness.

This biopic of Freud was directed by John Huston, who I think I've mentioned was not my favorite director, certainly not in the later part of his life when the movies became more self-indulgent. I can see why people would be interested in the idea of making a biopic on Sigmund Freud. Huston does, I think, about as well as possible with the material, but I still think Freud isn't going to be a movie for everybody.