Pressure Point (1962)

User Rating:

7.2/10   

Director:

Hubert Cornfield

Writers:

Hubert Cornfield (writer)
Robert Lindner (story)

Release Date:

9 March 1964 (Sweden)

Genre:

Drama

Tagline:

FILMED IN BLACK, IN WHITE, IN RAGE!... a motion picture without a safety valve!

Plot:

An African-American prison psychiatrist (Sidney Poitier) finds the boundaries of his professionalism...

Plot Keywords:

Psychiatrist | Psychoanalysis | Independent Film

Awards:

Nominated for Golden Globe.

Cast

Sidney Poitier	...	Doctor (Chief Psychiatrist)
Bobby Darin	...	Patient
Peter Falk	...	Young psychiatrist
Carl Benton Reid	...	Chief medical officer
Mary Munday	...	Bar hostess
Barry Gordon	...	Boy patient
Howard Caine	...	Tavern owner
Gilbert Green	...	Jewish Father
Anne Barton	...	Mother
James Anderson	...	Father
Richard Bakalyan	...	Jimmy
Lynn Loring	...	Jewish Girl
Yvette Vickers	...	Drunken woman

Runtime:

91 min

Country:

USA

Language:

English

Color:

Black and White

Aspect Ratio:

1.85 : 1

Sound Mix:

Mono

Certification:

Iceland:16 | New Zealand:R16 | Finland:K-12 | Sweden:15

Filming Locations:

Glenwood Springs, Colorado, USA

Company:

Stanley Kramer Productions

Relatively Overdone Melodrama Deals with the Paranoid Delusions of a Truly Hateful Convict

Although the genesis of hate crimes is worthy of a film treatment, this heavy-handed 1962 melodrama is weighed down by too many theatrical flourishes to be as genuinely powerful as was once intended. Some critics at the time praised the bravery of such an undertaking, but one can see in hindsight how director Hubert Cornfield, who co-wrote the screenplay with Robert Lindner, doesn't seem to trust the basic material enough to provide a more straightforward telling of the case history of a psychopathic convict who hates non-Aryans with a virulent passion. To further depersonalize the plot, he doesn't even give the characters proper names. As a typically austere Stanley Kramer production, it has the earmarks of the high-minded social consciousness prevalent in the comparatively better films he made during this period - 1959's "On the Beach" about nuclear disarmament, 1961's "Judgment at Nuremberg" about the Nazi atrocities and 1963's "A Child Is Waiting" about mental retardation.

As a framing device for the central story, a chief psychiatrist is confronted by a frustrated staff doctor threatening to resign due to the seeming hopelessness of getting through to an anti-white black patient. Hoping to convince the younger doctor not to give up, the psychiatrist - who happens to be black - flashes back to a similarly difficult case he handled during WWII when he was forced to treat a Nazi supporter who was in jail for sedition. The convict is a vicious racist and anti-Semitic, who is suffering from a sleep disorder and blackouts. The bulk of the movie is the dialogue between the two over the course of the convict's three-year sentence. What emerges is a portrait of a pathetic man who had a miserable childhood that led to random acts of sadism and ultimately his membership in the American Nazi (Bund) party.

Fantasy sequences and documentary footage are liberally used to emphasize the convict's malignant nature with melodramatic excess. The film's turning point is the decision to release the unrepentant convict, which pits the heretofore becalmed psychiatrist against the prison authorities convinced he should be paroled. As late as this comes in the movie, it's the only point where Sidney Poitier's performance as the psychiatrist comes alive. In fact, his fury is so characteristically electrifying that he replicated the scene on a more subtle level in the father-son showdown in Kramer's later "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner". As the convict, Bobby Darin gets the showier role, and while he is up to the challenge, he doesn't transcend it either. Peter Falk shows up briefly in the present-day scenes, while Carl Benton Reid adds some dimension to his small role as the chief medical officer. It all ends anti-climactically. The 2004 DVD offers no significant extras.