Freud: The Secret Passion
Freud: The Secret Passion, also known as Freud, is a 1962 American biographical drama film based on the life of Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud, directed by John Huston and produced by Wolfgang Reinhardt. It stars Montgomery Clift as Freud and Susannah York as his patient Cecily Koertner. Other cast members include Larry Parks, Susan Kohner, Eileen Herlie and Eric Portman.
Freud: The Secret Passion | |
---|---|
![]() Theatrical poster | |
Directed by | John Huston |
Produced by | Wolfgang Reinhardt |
Written by | Charles Kaufman Wolfgang Reinhardt Jean-Paul Sartre (uncredited) |
Story by | Charles Kaufman |
Starring | Montgomery Clift Susannah York Larry Parks Susan Kohner Eileen Herlie Eric Portman |
Music by | Jerry Goldsmith |
Cinematography | Douglas Slocombe |
Edited by | Ralph Kemplen |
Production company | |
Distributed by | Universal-International |
Release date |
|
Running time | 140 minutes |
Country | United States |
Language | English |
The film was theatrically released in the United States by Universal-International on December 12, 1962 and was selected to compete for the Golden Bear in the competition section at the 13th Berlin International Film Festival. It was nominated for two Academy Awards and four Golden Globe Awards, including Best Motion Picture – Drama and Best Actress in a Motion Picture – Drama for York.
Plot
This pseudo-biographical movie depicts Sigmund Freud's life from 1885 to 1890. At this time, most of his colleagues refused to treat hysteric patients, believing their symptoms to be ploys for attention. Freud, however, learns to use hypnosis to uncover the reasons for the patients' neuroses through his mentor and friend Josef Breuer. His main patient in the film is a young woman who refused to drink water and is plagued by a recurrent nightmare.
Cast
- Montgomery Clift as Sigmund Freud
- Susannah York as Cecily Koertner
- Larry Parks as Dr. Joseph Breuer
- Susan Kohner as Martha Freud
- Eileen Herlie as Frau Ida Koertner
- Fernand Ledoux as Dr. Charcot
- David McCallum as Carl von Schlossen
- Rosalie Crutchley as Frau Freud
- David Kossoff as Jacob Freud
- Joseph Furst as Herr Jacob Koertner
- Alexander Mango as Babinsky
- Leonard Sachs as Brouhardier
- Eric Portman as Dr. Theodore Meynert
- John Huston as Narrator (voice)
- Victor Beaumont as Dr. Guber
- Allan Cuthbertson as Wilkie
- Maria Perschy as Magda
- Moira Redmond as Nora Wimmer
Production history
![](../I/m/Freud'62.jpg)
In 1958, John Huston decided to make a film about the life of the young Sigmund Freud, and asked Jean-Paul Sartre to write a summary of a projected scenario. Sartre submitted a synopsis of 95 pages, which was accepted, but later completed a finished script that, if filmed, would have amounted to a running time of five hours, which Huston considered far too long. Huston suggested cuts, but Sartre submitted an even longer script of eight hours, justifying the even longer version by saying, "On peut faire un film de quatre heures s'il s'agit de Ben Hur, mais le public de Texas ne supporterait pas quatre heures de complexes" ("We can make a film of four hours in the case of Ben Hur, but the Texas public couldn't stand four hours of complexes.").[1] Huston and Sartre quarrelled, and Sartre withdrew his name from the film's credits.[2] Nevertheless, many key elements from Sartre's script survive in the finished film, such as the creation of the composite patient Cecily, who combines features of Freud's patients Anna O., Elisabeth von R., Dora, and others.[3]
Background
The film heavily compresses events, cases and acquaintances early in Freud's career, spanning from his work at the Vienna General Hospital under Theodor Meynert during the mid-1880s, through his research into hysteria and his seduction theory along with Breuer, up until his development of infantile sexuality and the Oedipus complex around the turn of the century that became the basis for his fundamental Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, first published in 1905.
The character of Cecily Körtner is based upon a number of early patients of Freud's, most heavily drawing on the Anna O. case but also Dora and others. Similarly, the character of Josef Breuer and his role as mentor and friend in Freud's life as portrayed by Larry Parks is in fact a combination of the real Breuer with Wilhelm Fliess.
Reception
Critical reception
... it's a fascinating attempt to mix a traditional biopic with more experimental elements, such as rather surreal dreams sequences.
As director John Huston's voiceover suggests, it's a film that's less interested in Freud himself than the possibilities of unlocking the human mind and how that can be shown on screen – how can you portray the ideas of psychology on screen? As a result it plays fast and loose with history in favour of trying to uncover what Freud's ideas mean. It is an interesting and entertaining movie, with a great central performance from Montgomery Clift.— Tim Isaac (Big Gay Picture Show), Freud (DVD)[4]
... a curiously involving biopic about that which interests us all – ourselves and what ails us. ... Freud is a strong and sombre drama about life's psychological traumas and the first man who attempted to quantify and cure them. It's a well-acted and very solid movie but stay well clear if you fancy a bit of diverting amusement. Both Freud and A Dangerous Method deal with the fact that movies about people talking are not exactly visually exciting but Huston (and Cronenberg) pull off the drama within the subject in their own very different and intriguing ways.
— Cineoutsider, Alien landscapes – A UK region 2 DVD review of FREUD[5]
A sincere and competent biopic on the early years of Dr. Sigmund Freud (Montgomery Clift) ... Clift makes for a brooding and introspective Freud, obsessed with proving his controversial theories correct. Huston films it as film noir, with Freud the detective. What makes Huston's black-and-white film remarkable is the dream sequences, which are photographed mostly in negative or overexposure. This mise en scéne gave it a tantalizing German expressionist look and made the patient's repressions come to life on the screen, telling more about the subject matter than the narrative's wearisome simplistic didactic tone.
— Dennis Schwartz's Movie Reviews, FREUD (aka: Freud: The Secret Passion)[6]
Montgomery Clift delivers a superb, yet troubled and complex interpretation that benefits from remarkable direction. Probably too risky for its day, the film was a surprise sleeper hit: theatres in the mid-west had to ditch scheduled features when audience demand quadrupled.. such was the morbidity of the times. An overlooked gem even to this day, this is an unfortunate loss since Freud: The Secret Passion is a remarkable film.
Huston's problem was to render an intellectual quest, one that wants to be told in words, in images suited to film. He chose a metaphorical structure that runs all through our literature, from the Odyssey to Star Trek: THE MIND IS A BODY MOVING THROUGH SPACE. ... The substitution of face for body, body for mind, movement through space for movement in thought — there is a pattern of substitutions running throughout Freud. ... My point about Freud, the movie, then, is finally that it is a tremendous success — if you look straight at it. I think that it is not only an extraordinarily good film as a visual experience, as acting, as structure, but it also embodies a highly personal vision of psychoanalysis and its founder. My vision of Huston's vision in Freud is that psychoanalysis reveals human life as an endless series of displacements from what we really and originally desire and seek. It is a vision that profoundly expresses Huston's own "as if" view of life. Huston is indeed an auteur, a genius, at least by his own definition. He enables you and me to see Freud and psychoanalysis in a strikingly new, but highly intelligent way."
— Norman N. Holland (A Sharper Focus), John Huston, Freud, 1962
Accolades
Year | Award | Category | Nominee(s) | Result |
---|---|---|---|---|
1963 | 15th Directors Guild of America Awards | Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Motion Pictures | John Huston | Nominated |
20th Golden Globe Awards | Best Film – Drama | Freud: The Secret Passion | Nominated | |
Best Actress – Drama | Susannah York | Nominated | ||
Best Supporting Actress | Susan Kohner | Nominated | ||
Best Director | John Huston | Nominated | ||
35th Academy Awards | Best Story and Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen | Charles Kaufman and Wolfgang Reinhardt | Nominated | |
Best Music Score – Substantially Original | Jerry Goldsmith | Nominated | ||
15th Writers Guild of America Awards | Best Written American Drama | Charles Kaufman and Wolfgang Reinhardt | Nominated | |
Reception in France
Élisabeth Roudinesco comments that Freud: The Secret Passion, "did not have any success. And yet the black and white photography of Douglas Slocombe recaptures superbly the baroque universe of fin de siècle Vienna. As for Montgomery Clift, he portrays an anguished, somber and fragile Freud, closer to the James Dean of Rebel without a Cause than to the mummified figure imposed by the official historians of psychoanalysis: a character, in any event, more Sartrean than Jonesian. The work was distributed to the movie houses of Paris at the beginning of June 1964, two weeks before Lacan's foundation of the Ėcole freudienne de Paris. It went completely unnoticed by the psychoanalysts of Paris, who failed to find in it the hero of their imagination."[2] Sartre did not see the film.[8]
Soundtrack
The mostly dissonant, atonal score to Freud was one of the early works by composer Jerry Goldsmith. It garnered Goldsmith his first Oscar nomination. The "Main Title" from Freud, as well as the tracks Charcot's Show and Desperate Case[9] later were purchased and reused without consent of Goldsmith by director Ridley Scott for the acid blood scene and others in the film Alien (1979), also scored by Goldsmith.[10]
Home media
Having previously been unavailable in a home media format, Freud: The Secret Passion was eventually released in the UK by Transition Digital Media in a 1.78:1 letter-boxed, non-anamorphic 4:3 format, on a Region 2 DVD edition on April 23, 2012.
See also
References
- Sartre, Le Scénario, 10; Scenario. viii.
- Roudinesco, Elisabeth. Jacques Lacan & Co: A History of Psychoanalysis in France, 1925–1985. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990, p. 166
- http://www.asharperfocus.com/Freud.html
- Isaac, Tim (2012). Freud (DVD), Big Gay Picture Show, April 23, 2012
- Alien landscapes – A UK region 2 DVD review of FREUD, Cineoutsider.com, May 28, 2012
- Schwartz, Dennis (2006). FREUD (aka: Freud: The Secret Passion), Dennis Schwartz's Movie Reviews, March 9, 2006
- Freud, passions secrètes (1962) de John Huston, Le Monde, June 13, 2012 (translated from French)
- Cohen-Solal, Annie. Sartre: A Life. London: William Heinemann Ltd, 1987, p. 385
- Kirgo, Julie (2009). Booklet to the 2009 Deluxe Edition of the OST to Freud, published by Varèse Sarabande Records and USI B Music Publishing (BMI)
- Alien soundtrack review at Filmtracks.com. Retrieved February 22, 2011.
Further reading
- Holland, Norman N. (1994). John Huston, Freud, 1962 (adapted essay from an earlier version published in How to See Huston's Freud: Perspectives on John Huston, Ed. Stephen Cooper. Perspectives on Film Series. New York: G. K. Hall, 1994. 164-83.)