Film review: Blind Alley (1939)

 

Funny little number, this one: supposedly a proto-noir, but is sort of a home-invasion (shades of Petrified Forest or Key Largo, with a criminal gang taking over a residence) thriller crossed with... a lecture on Freudian psychology.  Ralph Bellamy (whom we recognized as the wheelchair bound rich man in Hands Across the Table) plays an unconventional hero for a thriller: a psychology professor, who wins purely by treating the main bad guy, escaped murderer Hal Wilson 

(played, or perhaps overplayed by Chester Morris, with plenty of corny dialogue (he calls everything "screwy" or "screwball") and a "street" accent) to a talking cure.  Briefly: we meet Bellamy's Dr. Shelby giving his last lecture of the semester before his star pupil, Fred, leaves to get a job in the real world.  Fred arranges to visit the Shelbys, and another family (or rather: sort of menage a trois, because it's a couple where the husband is older and the wife brings along a younger man to "flirt" with - Shelby, enlightened shrink that he is, reassures his disapproving wife that it's perfectly normal) at their lakeside cabin.  But Hal Wilson is sprung from jail by his men and his loyal moll Mary.  Here he is bumping off the warden, whom they drove off with as a hostage but decide they no longer need when they get into the hills.  First it's fun

But almost immediately it sours.  

Wonder why?  Anyway, Hal and co. have to hideout by the lake across which he is to be ferried to safety by a boat to be brought by another accomplice (who never arrives - spoiler alert) and the cabin they decide to hide in is the Shelbys'.  They quickly take everyone hostage, and when Fred shows up 

he picks a fight, clocks two of the hoods before challenging Hal to a fight.  Bad move - the second of Hal's kills produces the same reaction.  At this point, mild Dr. Shelby decides it's gone far enough.  "I'm gonna destroy him" he says of Hal to his wife, continuing:

And so he does.  But he has to start by explaining Freud's theory of the unconscious.  Here's his diagram of the divide between the conscious and the unconscious mind, divide by the "censor band":

After Shelby explains the divide, to his credit, Hal asks a very good question:

But Shelby convinces him, and pretty soon it emerges that Hal has been plagued by the same nightmares since he was a child - these are described by Mary as he sleeps fitfully, and portrayed onscreen in negative.  They involve being terrified of the rain and trying to hide under an umbrella that has a hole that he has to plug with his hand, 

and finding quickly that the umbrella is surrounded by bars.  Hal also has two paralyzed fingers on the same hand, that Shelby diagnoses as a psychosomatic symptom of neurosis (and cures him - albeit at great cost to Hal).  Hal is keen to have his nightmares cured, but as Shelby's psychoanalysis digs deeper into Hal's childhood, Mary can feel she's getting pushed away and doesn't like it.  

Nevertheless we finally find out the source of the nightmares: it's that little boy Hal led the cops to where his abusive heel of a father was hiding out in a bar (which is at the end of a blind alley, and which, being remembered from childhood, looms like something out of the Cabinet of Dr. Caligari)

and they plugged him full of lead, so that his blood drips through the table Hal was hiding under (geddit)?  Hal is cured!  But meanwhile, one of the cooks (it's a pretty luxurious cabin - I guess college professors were paid a lot better then) or "kitchen mechanics" as Hal calls them, has made a break for it and brought the cops.  On going outside to plug a few as he runs for it, Hal discovers both that his fingers can now move, but that also, as Shelby predicted, he can't kill any more, because everyone becomes his dad.  The cops, however, are under no such restrictions.

A nifty little number, over in just over an hour, and with some satisfying subplots that I've glossed over (hint: the young wife sees her young lover in a much less flattering light after this night).  To quote the New York Times: "the rather whimsical experiment of grafting Dr. Freud's facile theory of dream symbols on a typical Columbia melodrama has justified itself admirably in the case of Blind Alley, at the Globe, by producing, on the whole, a rather better-than-typical Columbia melodrama".  I have had cause to comment before that Freudian psychology really was in the air in early-to-mid century movies, but never as explicitly as in this film.