Portrait of a patient resisting analysis

[sovay]

It is perhaps thematically appropriate that a film which misuses the definition of schizophrenia as badly as any other psychodrama of its era should be functionally two stories which share the same runtime, but I still wish Mine Own Executioner (1947) had just picked one. Given a choice between a melodrama of war trauma complete with repressed memories and split personalities and narcosynthesis and murder or a slice of life in a psychiatric free clinic just prior to the establishment of the NHS, if you ask me it's no choice at all.

The common ground of both narratives is the personal and professional travails of Felix Milne (Burgess Meredith), a lay analyst on the staff of the Emily Ward Psychiatric Clinic in London. His puckish face and his trickster-red hair give him the air of an iconoclast, but he's far from a free spirit. Formally speaking, Felix is "unqualified," which at this point in the history of the field means a well-trained, well-practiced, extremely skilled psychoanalyst whose degrees from Toronto and Vienna do not include an M.D. He's not a psychiatrist. It's irrelevant to his effectiveness as a therapist, it's even an advantage for patients who find it less daunting to approach a Mr. rather than Dr. Milne, but it can give prospective donors pause as to his professionalism, which makes him something of a liability at a volunteer clinic always struggling to meet its running costs. Then as now, the notion of mental health services as a fundamental right of people who can't afford them is a hard sell. It doesn't help when it comes to attracting philanthropists that the clinic's work is as unglamorous as it is necessary. Dr. James Garsten (John Laurie) comes down from Harley Street to treat a former tube worker for claustrophobia. Dr. Hans Tautz (Martin Miller) employs Ferenczi-style active techniques with a teenager who shoplifts. Felix himself is introduced mid-session with Charlie Oakes (Malcolm Dalmayne), a small, bespectacled, nearly silent schoolboy whose problem is less bedwetting than being beaten for it. The trustee currently being courted by the director insists that his funding is earmarked for strictly medical research and no one is quite sure from week to week if the whole socially equitable endeavor is going to fold up around them. For income, Felix has a private practice, but he seems doubtful to resentful that he does much good with it, spending most of his time as a validating ear for older women at loose ends like Lady Maresfield (Helen Haye). "Listen to Harley Street," he fires back when Dr. Garsten reassures him that there's nothing wrong with paying work. "Relieve their wallets and you relieve their minds." All the same, his handling of his patients is serious, honest, and respectful regardless of their position on the social or sliding scales; he reserves his stress-banked displacements of temper for Pat (Dulcie Gray), the wife he can't decide whether to cling to for dear life or leave. He could be right that there's some deep-seated symbolism in her chronically careless breakage of small household objects which leads him to call her, sometimes still affectionately, "my own personal rhinoceros." It could just be nerves, such as being emotionally jerked around will give a person. Either way, it's obvious to everyone except Felix that his irritation with Pat's clumsiness and disorganization is just coincidentally increasing as he circles the drain of an affair with their married friend Barbara Edge (Christine Norden), a cool blonde who's always liked a thing best when she can take it away from someone else. Physician, get thy head out of thine ass or you might just wind up kissing it goodbye.

Mine Own Executioner—the title doubles for the epigraph by John Donne—was adapted by Nigel Balchin from his own 1945 novel and informed by the author's experience as an industrial psychologist, much as his previous novel The Small Back Room (1943), which I know much better thanks to its incarnation on film by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger in 1949, had drawn on his war work as a back-room boy. In neither case would I want to call roman à clef without knowing a lot more about Balchin, but it is notable, especially by comparison with more sensationally Freudian age-mates like The Seventh Veil (1945), Spellbound (1945), or The High Wall (1947), how practically the film treats the work of mental health. Just because it's a vocation doesn't mean it's not a job. We form our impressions of the clinic through informal, for the most part unpreachy details: coffee in the staff room, collegial chit-chat, the one coworker who isn't enough of a slacker to fire but nobody actually likes. Who has time for expressionism between understaffing and overwork? With one of his characteristically back-handed twists of humor, Felix downplays his rapport with his patients as a "confidence trick," but nonetheless gives a cogent, demystifying précis of talk therapy in response to a jocular dismissal of his profession as "bunkum":

"What do you do? I mean, supposing I came to you, what do you do to me?"
"I wouldn't do anything to you. You do all the work. I just get you to talk."
"What about, the weather?"
"Yes, if that's what you want to talk about."
"And where does that get me?"
"Well, that gets you used to talking with me. Then, with any luck, you'll tell me something that does matter."

Patients like the transference-prone Mr. Harrison (George Benson) may gush gratefully over the extraordinary powers of analysis, but Felix is more realistically aware of his shortfalls and impediments, such as he's encountering in the family of Charlie Oakes: "The moment I get anywhere with that kid, his father hits him with a strap and I'm right back where I started." His long-running friction with the director of the clinic is rooted as much if not more in his frustration with the paucity of resources available for people in need as in his own contingent position which gives him little ground to argue from. More germane to our belief in him as a good therapist as opposed to a merely sympathetic one, we are given to understand that whatever the disarray of his private life, his professional boundaries are holding when he flatly refuses to consider Bab as a client. No matter how complacently her husband supports it for her "sex complex" and she spells out the erotic possibilities of all those long, lovely, uninterrupted sessions when she could confess her most unspeakable fantasies, Felix has the guts and the ethics to tell her and mean it, "I wouldn't take you on as a patient if it's all that stood between me and the workhouse." He still can't manage to buy his wife a fur coat without muddling it into an intimate moment with the other woman, as if his grasp of boundaries disintegrates the instant it's no longer required by his work. His attempt to justify the intensity of his attraction to Bab by reference to his inner fourteen-year-old is a specious deflection and rightly shot down by Pat, but he's not wrong that there's something immature about him, a need to stress-test his relationships to prove their security, which may or may not account for his difficulty in being honest about them. Of the two of them, Pat is the one asking clear-eyed if they are headed for a divorce while Felix insists to the contrary with a heartiness he wouldn't let stand for ten seconds if he heard it in his professional capacity. As he notes over drinks with Dr. Garsten, "That's what seems so ridiculous. I spend my whole life sorting out these messes for other people. Why can't I do it for myself?" His colleague's conclusion that if he were better for his wife, he wouldn't be as good for his patients, may strike the modern viewer as a less than persuasive calibration of work-life balance, but the conversation does successfully personalize the film's mission statement that psychotherapy isn't some arcane science practiced by rarefied super-humans, it's a tricky, subjective profession whose experts are just as human as the cases they treat. Or as Garsten says, ruefully and encouragingly, "If we weren't a couple of neurotics who know exactly what it feels like to make fools of ourselves, then how on earth could we feel other people's troubles when they do the same?" By now, of course, it is practically a duty of the genre that any fictional mental health professional should be a tire fire, but in 1947 the admission of normal fallibility is still rare and welcome, especially since the structure of the film needs to bring Felix to the point of crisis without writing off either psychology as a field or him as a reasonable practitioner of it. It shouldn't be an impossible order; medical professionals have been screwing up in the service of drama as far back as Sumerian jokes. I just wish it didn't leave a film whose small scale was not without its own compelling stakes feeling T-boned by a Hollywood thriller.

Insofar as I can consider it on its own terms, the case of Adam Lucian (Kieron Moore) makes an ambitious, downbeat addition to the catalogue of damaged veterans with which so much post-war film and literature is concerned. What happened to this darkly handsome, decorated, disabled Spitfire pilot out in a Japanese POW camp that he would try suddenly one night to strangle his beloved wife and not remember it afterward? Felix has only to hear the preliminary details from Molly Lucian (Barbara White) to warn her that he's not the right man for the job of finding out, but his efforts to refer the case out meet with the calm, obdurate wall of Adam's mistrust of doctors and Molly's accommodation of her husband; he agrees at last because the alternative feels like dereliction and regrets it immediately. "He's a bad schizo and I don't know enough about bad schizos. They're off my beat." How apt and obnoxious that the use of the term signals the first fissure in the film's low-key credibility. Schizophrenia, reads the diagnosis at the top of Felix's initial assessment of Adam Lucian, elaborated by Split personality clearly indicated and then Conflict in early childhood? In fairness to the film, its ultimate implication of childhood dissociation resurrected as a coping mechanism in adult time of war is not psychologically bananas—a similar device minus some of the Oedipal freight figures centrally in Pat Barker's The Eye in the Door (1993). The EC Comics flair with which it summons the specter of the murderous, regressive alter, however, knocks the film instantly off its carefully quotidian axis and into the five-alarm drama of psychopathology. The first time that Adam stretches out on his analyst's couch to recall the experience of almost murdering his wife, the cinematography by Wilkie Cooper plunges into subjective chiaroscuro faster than Adam's narration can split himself into an observer and his wife into an object: "He saw it in the bathroom mirror. He looked up as he was cleaning his teeth and he saw it . . . And suddenly it was Moll I'd got hold of." Darkness clings to his sessions as if he carries it with him, like the walking stick he casually thieved from Felix or the cigarette case he ostentatiously offers as a illicit gift. It's an alienating choice. It sets his scenes so far out of the sturdier style of the rest of the picture that they feel generically as well as dramatically like interpolations from the psychoanalytic noir shooting on the next stage over; it leaves no doubt of the depth of his problems, but somewhat confuses the original thesis that far from dealing in beautiful amnesiacs and the criminally insane, a psychologist's job is often drab and bureaucracy-ridden and stressful and still valuable. Technically speaking, the sequence in which Adam with a shot of pentothal in his arm recovers the suppressed guilt of his stint as a prisoner of war is an expressionist tour-de-force, its focalization fractured between the visual first person of his point-of-view memories and the auditory third person of his dissociated recall, ghosted further with double exposures like his Japanese interrogator lashing at him from behind his therapist's desk until finally all barriers collapse in the unsupportable shame of breaking under torture: "I told them everything I knew and what I didn't know, I made up. Everything he asked me. Everything." Affectively, it just doesn't hit as hard as watching another interaction slide messily sideways between Felix and Pat with their much less cinematically legible inner lives. The next morning when a suspiciously bright-eyed Adam declares himself cured and good to go, Felix has to caution him gently that in fact the opposite is true: "This thing inside you that's causing all the trouble is getting frightened. It can feel us moving the layers away from on top of it, and it's afraid that if we go on, it'll be found and kicked out. So it wants you to stop the treatments before that happens, you see?" Nothing about this language of illness protecting itself has dated—black dogs and brain weasels, depression lies. The problem with the case of Adam Lucian isn't even so much that its psychoanalytic discourse has worn less well with the years, it's that the two ways of looking at the mind keep running up against one another on the same celluloid and after a while you are surprised that the film itself doesn't break down, unless like me you think it actually does, but unfortunately not in a metatextual way.

I love the ending of Mine Own Executioner, but I will argue till doomsday with how the film gets there. Specifically, who ordered the murder-suicide and who ordered it at such a pitch of action that when a self-shot man plummeted off the side of an office block into the screams of onlookers in the street, I don't even think I felt as sorry as I should have for Felix with no head for heights left clinging to his turntable ladder, having opened his dramatic failure to talk his patient down with the strategically and thoroughly honest, "You've given me the devil of a climb. Do you mind ladders? They scare me stiff." I don't care if Adam does have a case of movieland multiple personality to rival a slasher flick, he's already gunned down his wife and menaced Pat and treated Felix to a calmly disordered conversation before knocking him down and fleeing into the night where earlier we witnessed him enacting such infantile aggressions as tearing down a poster for Nestlé's Milk, we don't need the full King Kong. The script at least does a decent job of distinguishing that while violence was always a possibility in light of the scope of his disturbance, the murder-suicide was not tragically, inevitably doomed to occur as it did. Headachy and feverish, Felix is already second-guessing his agreement to reschedule with Adam as the man disappears around the block: "I don't think—I should have let him go—" When he resigns from the clinic over the unresolved issue of funding dependent on medically qualified staff, we don't know if he would have made the same decision on a day when he was feeling less seedy and down on himself, just as we don't know if he would have gone self-destructively straight to Bab and drunk himself into all but bed with her or if he might have been home when the call came in that a severely hallucinating Adam had put five bullets into his Moll, who had not after all credited the urgent recommendation of Mr. Milne that she move out for the duration of her husband's treatment or at least take care that he should never see her as "a vague or shadowy figure," waiting in the half-light of the window like the Japanese sentry whose skull his amoral alter cracked in order to get them both out of the prison camp. We don't know if it would have made any difference not to let him go. It doesn't matter to Adam or Molly Lucian and nor does it matter to Felix Milne.

As if the sensation fiction side of the film plunged to its death with Adam, it returns to less conventionally thrilling, more complicated terrain with the inquest. It is a humiliating ordeal for Felix, as he was warned it would be. The coroner's undisguised animosity toward an unqualified man dovetails so painfully with his own lacerating guilt that he calls himself, savagely and under oath, a "quack," but with Dr. Garsten testifying to the "skill and integrity" with which he handled an almost impossible case, the verdict leaves him out of the deaths of the Lucians. It does not feel like vindication or reassurance. It feels like giving justice the slip with smoke and mirrors from Harley Street. He is shortly found at home in a bitter funk, methodically tearing his files to pieces and throwing them to the floor in exactly the sort of mess he would give Pat hell for leaving around. For her part, when she catches him at it, instead of rushing to his side with effusions of consolation on which his temper might find some purchase, she greets his announcement that he's going out of practice like an astringent stranger, as deliberate as if she wouldn't have believed it of him: "Well, well . . . Just because something went wrong and somebody criticized you?" It's such a reversal of roles, it feels curiously honest, as if we are seeing them for the first time as they should be, her invigorating instead of accommodating, him vulnerable instead of roughshod, so that to this unfamiliar person who puts her arms so familiarly around him from behind he can finally voice his exhaustion and shame and fear before the sound of the doorbell scales him back up to a panicky anger. "This job needs a God to do it properly and I'm not a God!" makes a great exit line, but his grand gesture of tearing righteously out of his consulting room to tell off the next patient is pulled up short by the fact that the next patient is Charlie Oakes with his round glasses and his hair combed so straight it hurts and his downcast little face that hardly ever lets anyone look into it any more than he can be gotten to answer one question a session out of three and Felix dissolves into a soundless laugh which he's careful not to inflict on the child, because he's laughing at himself. "That's about the size of it," he reflects as he returns to Pat, who shares the joke with a sympathetic smile. "That's me. I have a certain talent for dealing with people's mental troubles. And sometimes I have headaches, and then I let them go away and shoot their wives. But at other times I treat them with skill and integrity and I cure them"—as wryly as fellow-feeling—"of wetting their beds." It's a wonderful way of grounding the character, the trickster caught in his own trap. He might have been able to sustain the note of injured self-pity with Lady Maresfield, but he can hardly quit his profession in a fit of the sulks with Charlie Oakes uncomplainingly waiting for him: if a ten-year-old with the self-esteem of sidewalk gum can show up to do the work week after week, you, too, sweetheart. I remain un-enamored of the assertion that despite his newly clarified commitment to Pat, Felix will hardly ever have anything left over from his job to bring home to her and she'll have to be fine with it, but at least it is a mutual decision following on an honest conversation and ends in an embrace of real affection, not one party or the other protesting too much. The last gesture nevertheless belongs, rewardingly and appropriately, to Charlie Oakes. In response to Felix's customarily casual greeting of "Hello, Charlie. How's life?" he flashes up at his therapist a sudden sweet smile, the first time all movie we have seen him make eye contact with anyone. It's such a small thing; it's such an important one. It doesn't mean that anyone's problems are solved, but it means it's worth keeping on trying. Some days that's not a second best.

I am not a psychologist, I just have them in the family, but by association it's one of the professions whose fictional representation interests me and even when it verges on literally losing the plot, Mine Own Executioner reads as an unusually sincere effort to me. Especially because the intercutting of certain scenes as well as motifs suggests that the respective issues of Adam and Felix should be viewed in dialogue with one another, I would love to be able to construct a reading in which the more melodramatic passages are intended first to destabilize and then to rupture the film's subjectivity just as trauma has done for its dissociated character's psyche, but really it just feels like a miscalculation of how much escalation the story and the mise-en-scène could stand. I imagine the blame can be divided between Balchin and director Anthony Kimmins, although I should then remember to credit them for some of the film's smaller, delightful touches, such as Felix's lighter which has an impish, Freudian habit of not flicking on when its owner is operating against his own interests, like a subconscious pilot light. If I am keeping track of mental health in the movies, this one is nowhere near as successful as The October Man (1947), but it's a hell of a lot better than Possessed (1947). It came from the dubious recesses of TVTime and I could watch it on Blu-Ray or BFI Player if I were in another country—in this one, I don't seem able to get it in decent condition for love, money, or the Internet Archive. I regret it. Like its protagonist, some of it is sound as a bell and some of it's a disaster, but what else is new about the human condition? This bunkum brought to you by my skilled backers at Patreon.

Comments

[selkie]

Huzzah!
I love, as usual, this very finely shaded look at a work of art that I’m not likely to look at on my own. Maybe that’s weird, but it’s very helpful.

[sovay]

I love, as usual, this very finely shaded look at a work of art that I’m not likely to look at on my own. Maybe that’s weird, but it’s very helpful.

Thank you! I don't even think it's particularly weird, but I am glad it's helpful.

[muccamukk]

It's really nice to see one of your long reviews again!

[sovay]

It's really nice to see one of your long reviews again!

Thank you! It had begun to feel very strange how much I wasn't thinking or writing about film (or almost anything else, really).

[dramaticirony]

Fascinating! So glad you decided that there was no "expiration limit" for reviewing a movie you had seen in the spring.

[sovay]

So glad you decided that there was no "expiration limit" for reviewing a movie you had seen in the spring.

Thank you! I had seen several things I wanted to talk about!

[radiantfracture]

Wonderfully nuanced take.

This makes me think I might enjoy the original novel.

[sovay]

Wonderfully nuanced take.

Thank you!

This makes me think I might enjoy the original novel.

I would love to hear what you think of it. Balchin falls into the weird category of authors whose screen work—adaptations or original screenplays—I know far better than their actual books.

[igenlode]

I've read the novel but had no idea that it had been filmed; this review makes it sound like a very faithful adaptation. N.B. in the book, Lucian doesn't plummet dramatically to the street; he just sort of slumps on the ledge, so that was evidently embellished to make the scene more of an action climax...

I seem to remember reading that Nigel Balchin was said later in life to have regretted the trite and (to my mind) thoroughly unconvincing ascription of Lucian's problems to the good old Freudian belief that as a boy he wanted to kill his father and marry his mother. That was the one part of the otherwise humane and nuanced depictions of psychiatry in this book that I totally failed to swallow -- it felt as if the author had grabbed a convenient caricature out
of the nearest textbook, rather than depicting real-life behaviours as he does elsewhere.
But I can't locate where I originally found this alleged authorial recantation, so I can't vouch for its truth.

[sovay]

I've read the novel but had no idea that it had been filmed; this review makes it sound like a very faithful adaptation.

That's really useful to know! I also appreciate the drama check on the murder-suicide.

But I can't locate where I originally found this alleged authorial recantation, so I can't vouch for its truth.

I would be willing to believe it. The Oedipal element is present (and still unconvincing) in the film, but it isn't as wholesale as it sounds like it is the novel, so Balchin may have been rethinking its effectiveness even then.

Thank you!

[igenlode]

It seems to be extremely minimal in the book as well; I've just been looking it up, and on page 211 (of 252), Milne still explicitly says that "he would never know now what had been underneath with Lucian -- the real thing that was wrong, apart from the Jap business". Then on p213 we suddenly get Lucian announcing incoherently "My father gave her a terrible time, but I loved her very much. I was only a child, of course. Nevertheless she was unfaithful to me with him, so I killed him first and then I shot her. [...] The interesting thing is that if she hadn't been unfaithful to me with him I should never have been born. Mrs Milne pointed that out to me."

And that is basically it so far as the whole book is concerned -- the big explanation of what is supposedly at the root of all these events. It felt like a slap in the face: as if Balchin had picked up a textbook on psychoanalysis and it had fallen open on 'the *real* reason why men kill women'.

There is one more rambling statement from Lucian up on the ledge when he says "Standing there naked he was magnificent. [...] I bashed his skull in and then shot her. His skull didn't crush. The stick bounced off it and stung my hands." He suddenly slumped forwards and said, "The bitch went to bed with him," and started to cry.

And then at the inquest (p236) Milne assures the coroner: "He knew he'd killed a woman. But as I say, he was identifying his wife and his mother. He was also confusing a Japanese he had killed in the war with his father." And that is, so far as I can tell, literally the sum total of the explanation given in the book; it just appears to take it for granted that of course the Œdipus complex is the root of all insanity.

(Interestingly, the author previously has Milne insist to the inquest that his patient's demeanour was 'schizoid' but that he was *not* suffering from 'schizophrenia', which would have been an equally reductive way of explaining away his behaviour -- Balchin actively abstains from the 'evil alternate personality' trope.)

[sovay]

"He knew he'd killed a woman. But as I say, he was identifying his wife and his mother. He was also confusing a Japanese he had killed in the war with his father." And that is, so far as I can tell, literally the sum total of the explanation given in the book; it just appears to take it for granted that of course the Œdipus complex is the root of all insanity.

This is fascinating, because I agree it's a hopeless cliché of an explanation and it does not appear in those words in the film; almost none of the lines you have quoted here do. The Oedipal implications are still present, but much less bluntly spelled out. When Adam is asked to talk a little about his parents during his first session with Felix, the distant manner in which he replies, "My father was a barrister" is contrasted with—underscored by a sharp glance from Felix—the warmth that crosses his face when he adds, "My mother was his wife." Felix does refer to something underneath the war trauma, but cautiously, when he's trying unsuccessfully to persuade Molly to keep her distance from her husband so long as he's in treatment: "My guess is that there's something a good deal deeper . . . I don't know, I haven't gone that far yet." Adam's incoherent statement while holding the Milnes at gunpoint references his mother in a context of betrayal generalized così fan tutte to Molly and Pat, but not as explicitly as the novel and without the phantasy of father-murder: "Look, I know about women. It's quite clear now. In some ways, it's a pity that it wasn't clear before, but I was only a child at the time . . . I don't want Molly brought into this. She was a grand kid, and anybody who says anything else is a liar! You know, Felix, he worshipped that girl . . . They're all the same. No principles." Rambling on the ledge, he does join the killing of the Japanese sentry with the murder of his wife, but again the sense of sexual betrayal is oblique: "I bashed his skull. Then I shot her. His skull didn't crack. The stick bounced off it and stung my hands. They're all the same." Felix during the inquest does not make the equation of the sentry with the father and the wife with the mother. There are, however, elements of the mise-en-scène reinforcing the idea of trauma or dysfunction connected with childhood—at the start of his subjective flashback, Adam is whistling "Rock-a-bye Baby" right before he's shot out of the sky, Spitfire and all; the tune later recurs diegetically in the harmonica-playing of a boy whom Adam passes in the street as he wanders vaguely, worryingly home and is then taken up in progressively distorted form by the score as he first almost strikes a couple of boys who accidentally run into him and then attacks the milk advertisement, on which is depicted a plump, smiling baby. So it's less flatly reductive than novel's statement, but the fact of it being more diffuse didn't actually make it more disguised or less annoying. It really was like someone kept holding up a clapper board which read "Movie Psychology Goes Here."

Balchin actively abstains from the 'evil alternate personality' trope.

The film doesn't go so far as to treat the other personality as evil, but it is depicted as amoral, or perhaps pre-moral if it's meant to be very young, and since it's uppermost only in states of trauma or violence, it's hard for the viewer to feel neutral about it. Felix does say at the inquest that he had diagnosed Adam as "markedly schizoid," but the film has already failed to differentiate a schizoid personality from schizophrenia from DID. It's really curious to me that Balchin insisted on the distinction in the novel and then fudged it for the screen. This is fast becoming one of the movies where I would love to get hold of the shooting script if it exists, because I want to know what happened in the intermediate stages.

[igenlode]

Definitely fascinating because you can practically *see* the author in the process of 'shading' his existing work (which is the mental term I use for it when I do it) to shift the tone of it by tweaking the available material without actually changing anything...

The lines you quote are all there, I think, in the novel -- at any rate I recognise them. The specifically cinematic stuff (boys in the street, cigarette lighter that doesn't work) isn't in there, or not that I noticed. (The whole book is from Milne's point of view, so the flashback is given in the form of Lucian talking on the analyst's couch; I can see why you'd want to change that for filming.)

And when I go through the book from the beginning, there is all sorts of background Freudian stuff... which makes sense, really, because that's what psychiatrists of that era believed in, so naturally it's what they would talk shop about, no matter what their patients actually did. The problem is when you then get real people supposedly behaving according to textbook theory... like the characters in films who get soaked and then start sneezing a matter of minutes later as a matter of narrative shorthand, because 'everyone knows' that falling into cold water gives you a cold :-p

There's a lot that I like about the book, and its depiction of psychiatry is admirably humane and sympathetic (even if I can't help automatically identifying with Adam Lucian and his kneejerk hostility and desire to resist letting out anything of importance -- *which*, it has just occurred to me for the first time, is utterly and completely natural in the light of his interrogation trauma. Ouch.) When it comes to his professional work Milne is clearly both selfless and good at what he does, going by what we learn about other patients. It's the whole reductive Oedipal thing that I find verging on the insulting; attempting to compare someone's very real war trauma to some theory about parental jealousy, and then going so far as to claim that the latter is the *real* problem, and his sufferings and agonised sense of betrayal in the jungle are just a little minor detail to clear up first :-(
A bit like telling a concentration camp survivor that all her problems stem from penis envy...

Molly Lucian consistently refers to her husband as "that boy" and "the boy Adam", if childhood is supposed to be significant, and upon his second attack on her she deflects him by smiling and saying "Don't do anything you wouldn't want mother to know about" (although the book rather suggests that it is the smile and not the 'mother' that is significant in Lucian's case... but never explains why).

In his run-down for Barbara on what a psychiatrist actually does, Milne tells her in reference to the idea of repression that "very often the root of the matter is something which happened when he was a small kid and which he literally hasn't thought of since."

"I tell you, you mustn't think of sex as just going to bed with people. That's why the layman doesn't believe in this stuff. Someone has told him that trouble may arise because a kid of three was in love with its mother, and he thinks it's bunkum. So it is in the sense he means. I always remember a time when old Loewe, who taught me, was lecturing in England. He'd been talking about a case and at the end a very distinguished old philosopher who's dead now got up and said, 'Do I understand you to say, sir, that this child of four was jealous of his father's sexual relations with his mother?' Old Loewe hesitated and then just said 'Yes.' The old boy looked at him for a moment and then said, very politely, ' I find that very difficult to believe' and sat down. You see they were talking about entirely different things."

Foreshadowing :-p
(Although the author notably fails to elucidate in what sense Milne thinks the idea is *not* bunkum...)

Milne's initial mention of Lucian as 'very schizoid' is when he describes his patient to one of his colleagues as "Half the time he just isn't there when you talk to him" and as 'busy looking inside at himself', and comments that such patients "can't form any sort of relationship" (although he presumably means in terms of forming *new* relationships, since he also says "This chap will still come to life if you talk about his wife".) To which his colleague's diagnosis is "He's had enough of the real world. He's got one of his own in the making. Your job is to sell him the world that the real world's a better place."

How that relates to the modern concept of 'a schizoid personality' I don't know, but it clearly isn't the popular image of schizophrenia -- Lucian doesn't have multiple personalities but is just withdrawn from any engagement with the outside world.
Milne tells Patricia: "The most hopeful thing is that he's beginning to dislike me quite a lot. [...] as long as he'll feel something -- anything-- there's a chance for him. Several times he started off and I thought it was coming with a bang. But he just sank back into that queer not-quite-there mood that schizos have."

Schizophrenia, reads the diagnosis at the top of Felix's initial assessment of Adam Lucian, elaborated by Split personality clearly indicated and then Conflict in early childhood?
That's simply not in the book in any form. We don't get any written assessment sheet (cinematic short-hand, presumably), or any of those phrases used in conversation. So all that material was deliberately introduced for the purposes of the film: to provide an audience-familiar explanation maybe?

"He's a bad schizo and I don't know enough about bad schizos. They're off my beat."
I don't think this line or anything like it appears in the book either -- certainly not during or after the initial discussion with Molly,



In that initial talk with Milne, Lucian comes out with a lot of stuff about aeroplanes that sounds as if it might be going to lead to some connection as to why he might have tried to murder his wife, but is never explained and presumably gets dropped in favour of the Freudian red herring.

"That bitch of a Spitfire [...] She let me down." His eyes flashed with anger.
"How?"
"Cracking up like that," said Lucian vaguely. "If she wasn't bust up I'd take a chopper to her, the--"

"I don't want to give you a wrong impression," he said. "I've nothing whatever against Spitfires. I was a Spit pilot and I'd rather fly a Spit than anything else."
"Oh, I quite see that," said Milne. "This was just a bad specimen?"
"She hadn't been," said Lucian sombrely. "She'd been a honey. But--" He made a slight gesture of finality.
"You disliked her for--cracking up on you?"
"Something like that."

But there's never any suggestion that he does feel that Molly has 'cracked up on' him, or let him down in any way, which would otherwise offer at least a semi-plausible tie-in as to how the war psychosis might have this side-effect...

When Adam is asked to talk a little about his parents during his first session with Felix, the distant manner in which he replies, "My father was a barrister" is contrasted with—underscored by a sharp glance from Felix—the warmth that crosses his face when he adds, "My mother was his wife."
The book hints, if anything, that Lucian is distant and reluctant to talk about his mother: "My father was a barrister." [...] There was a moment's pause. Lucian leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. "And my mother was his wife," he said, with a slight far-away smile.
(NB the 'smile' here is the one that is constantly evoked during this interview--sometimes described as 'a meaning smile', or a 'queer, cunning little smile'--as a sign that he is evading the question again; I don't know if that was what the screenplay actually intended by what you interpreted as 'the warmth that crosses his face'...)

On rereading the book it turns out that the totally weird line from Lucian up on the ledge, "I quite realise that it will be misunderstood. But what does that matter? Standing there he was magnificent" is an allusion back to his second interview with Milne, after the shop-lifting episode, when he actually describes the murder attempt:

"I saw all this," he said quickly. "I sat in a chair and watched it, just like I did this afternoon. He came out of the bathroom. He had a dressing-gown on, but it was open in front and he looked pretty good. He looks glorious naked. The girl was asleep. The overhead light was on, and the counterpane was blue and the sheets were blue and she was black. She was lying with her back to him. He could see the shape of her under the bedclothes."
He stopped for a moment and lay breathing quickly, his nostrils quivering slightly. "He stood and looked at her for a moment and said, 'Moll.' But she was asleep and didn't hear. That made him angry. [...]"
"Why?" said Milne quietly.
"Because it did," said Lucian loudly. "Why the hell should she have been asleep? Anyhow, he thought, if she's asleep she might as well be dead. She'd be better dead, anyhow. They all would." [...]
"Why would they?"
"It's no good asking me. All the good ones are dead, anyhow. And better for them than to be married to me. Anyhow he came across the room very quietly so as not to wake her and went round to the other side of the bed. Then he took his dressing-gown off and stood there looking grand and magnificent and strong." Lucian's whole body was shaking convulsively, and beads of sweat were on his forehead. "And then he took her throat in his hands so that his fingers went right round it, and squeezed and squeezed. She woke up and struggled and thrashed about with her legs. She was strong but nothing like as strong and big as he was. She had her eyes open and she looked silly with her eyes staring and her mouth open. I clapped. It was good. You know what I mean. It was the moment. And then --"
He stopped suddenly, heaved a deep sigh, and lay quiet for a long while. The shivering was gradually subsiding. "Well then, she smiled," he said at last in a dull tired voice.

No question about seeing "it" in the bathroom mirror, either there or in the earlier session, where Milne just keeps saying "then you came out of the bathroom" (echoing where Lucian has broken off mid-confession), and no question of the attack being anything other than consciously on his wife. He knows that it is Molly all along.
Instead we've got this magnificent rampant male business, which is obviously meant to be significant since Lucian repeats it again in extremis, but goodness knows how. (Are we supposed to interpret it as a claim that Lucian was traumatised to the point of murder by seeing his father naked at some point during his childhood?)

I'd guess that the 'milk advertisement' attacked by Adam in the film is probably an echo of the conversation Milne has with an advertising agent during a particularly dire party in the book, where Milne (who is somewhat drunk) advises him that in order to sell cream cheese he needs to go for the milk angle: "My dear man. Milk. Mother. [...] The child at the breast. [...] You'll never find a more psychological angle than that. It goes right back to first principles. [...]Take it from me, you can't go wrong with the milk appeal. Why have milk bars been such a success? Why do people eat milk chocolate?"

I hadn't remembered at all that *Molly* actually talks about her husband's parents in the book:

"His father died a while back-- ten years or so. And his mother died just about six months before we met. [...] I guess he liked his mother a lot. But he never talks about her at all. His old man he has talked about sometimes. I reckon Adam and he didn't get on too well. Adam says he was a cold sort of guy who ran everybody around a lot. I think Adam was afraid of him when he was a kid."
"But he liked his mother?"
"Sure. It seems she was pretty sweet. I've seen her picture and she looks swell. I think Adam reckons his dad gave her a bad time."
"He says that?"
"He doesn't say anything much. That's just my guess."

Felix does refer to something underneath the war trauma, but cautiously, when he's trying unsuccessfully to persuade Molly to keep her distance from her husband so long as he's in treatment: "My guess is that there's something a good deal deeper . . . I don't know, I haven't gone that far yet."
In the book, he says "almost certainly the real root of the trouble lies a lot further back than [the Burma business], and will be pretty difficult even if he does co-operate."
He doesn't say anything about not letting her husband see her as a vague or shadowy figure: he says "Then, first of all -- don't go to bed first. [...] Second --if any funny business starts don't try to cope with him -- get out and get quickly. [...] And third, ring me up at once if anything happens that you don't understand or don't like."

Discussing the progress of Lucian's case with a colleague, he says "This bloke's very schizoid as a rule. He just isn't interested -- isn't there. [...] What are the chances that it was purely the comparatively recent stuff which he was consciously suppressing -- that was making him act like a schizo? [...] There must have been some sort of predisposition."
To which the professional reply is: "He's got a predisposition and something touches it off. If you can remove the something, he may go back to what he was before, or he may stay schizoid, or he may be outwardly normal but with the predisposition increased."

So Milne is definitely hypothesising that the 'real' cause of the attacks is some dreadful childhood experience rather than the Burma business... "It's exactly the same with me. I know perfectly well that some of the less satisfactory things about me go back to when I was four, when my father died."

And he proceeds to tell Lucian that he wouldn't have been that upset about the torture, betrayal etc. if there hadn't been something wrong with him.

"You don't think that it was anything to worry about?" said Lucian bitterly.
"Not to that extent. Nothing is."

Because normal, healthy people aren't allowed to break down. Only weaklings break down, apparently. (Sorry -- my own bitterness slipping through there.)

Oddly enough Lucian doesn't react very well to this, and in fact proceeds to go off and kill his wife, although we never learn why...

After Milne's visit to Molly in the hospital he does in fact call Lucian 'schizophrenic'.

"I take it he's gone crazy?"
Milne said, "Yes. Schizophrenic."
"You were treating him for that?"
"Not exactly. I'm not an alienist."
[...]
"He's still got the gun. At least we haven't found it. He'll use it now, eh? If he gets a chance?"
"I don't know," said Milne slowly. "You can never tell with schizophrenics. But I should doubt it."
"Why? If he's crazy?"
"He probably won't realise that he's done anything wrong. They don't as a rule."

(I think the implication here may be that Lucian has *gone schizophrenic* when previously it was only a risk...)

He[...] decided that Lucian would undoubtedly be dead by now. If he had been a paranoid it would have been different. But a schizo of Lucian's type would be dead or wandering in a memoryless fugue. Mollie had been his only attachment to life. Killing her would be just a part of getting out. He suddenly realised that he would never know now what had been underneath with Lucian -- the real thing that was wrong, apart from the Jap business and so on.

[igenlode]

Adam's incoherent statement while holding the Milnes at gunpoint references his mother in a context of betrayal generalized così fan tutte to Molly and Pat, but not as explicitly as the novel and without the phantasy of father-murder: "Look, I know about women. It's quite clear now. In some ways, it's a pity that it wasn't clear before, but I was only a child at the time . . . I don't want Molly brought into this. She was a grand kid, and anybody who says anything else is a liar! You know, Felix, he worshipped that girl . . . They're all the same. No principles."

That's all in the same passage in the book -- it's just very much abridged (if that is a single speech all the way through). I can't transcribe the whole thing, because it's about a page and a half of dialogue, but those are various sentences appearing at various points in what he says, with extra stuff in between; for example, he describes his fictional father-murder as a crime passionel and laughs at "your taking all that trouble over the Japanese business, which wasn't of the slightest importance". Women 'all being the same' -- and not to be trusted -- is, in context, an allusion to the fact that he is convinced Pat will ring the police as soon as she can make an excuse to leave the room (as in fact she does).
I'm not sure that it's so much a deliberate shift of emphasis in this case as a simple case of abridgement for the screen.

(On the other hand, there is the presumably conscious choice to repeat the insistence that "they are all the same" in place of the outright statement that "The bitch went to bed with him" in the later scene...)

The ledge scene in the book doesn't really end on a high pitch of action. Lucian simply asks slowly "You don't think it hurt her?" (to which Milne, still trying to talk his patient down, lies and says no), and then says "That's fine. Then we'll go down now", and shoots himself.

His body swayed backwards and then fell forward again awkwardly into the niche with the side of his face jammed against the wall.
Milne looked at him dully and then shut his eyes and leaned wearily against the ladder. He was quite all right as long as he stood still, but he didn't see how he was going to get down. They were shouting on the roof. He kept his eyes shut and called, "All right. No hurry now."

a lay analyst on the staff of the Emily Ward Psychiatric Clinic in London

I wonder why the Norris Pile Clinic (headed by the eponymous Dr Norris Pile) was renamed the Emily Ward Clinic (presumably without an Emily Ward)?

[thisbluespirit]

Aw, I am very glad you were able to both watch and write about a film! \o/

[sovay]

Aw, I am very glad you were able to both watch and write about a film!

Thank you! I am still being cautious about it, but it feels like getting back part of my brain.

[gwynnega]

I love Burgess Meredith, and you've made me curious to see this film, even if it is a bit of a mess.

[sovay]

I love Burgess Meredith, and you've made me curious to see this film, even if it is a bit of a mess.

He's great in it!

[asakiyume]

if a ten-year-old with the self-esteem of sidewalk gum can show up to do the work week after week, you, too, sweetheart. --Wow, I can feel this so strongly: do it (keep doing it) for Charlie.

(Hair combed so straight it hurts is a wonderful description.)

The quote about talk therapy is great too, and the whole sense of quotidian-ness and necessity. Nice. But wow, the other plot. Big fat helping of do-not-want.

[sovay]

--Wow, I can feel this so strongly: do it (keep doing it) for Charlie.

I ran a description of this movie past my mother who was a child psychologist for years and she approved very strongly of Charlie as the catalyst: you don't leave kids hanging. You're the adult. You have the tools they don't. You get your issues together and you do what you know how to do.

The quote about talk therapy is great too, and the whole sense of quotidian-ness and necessity. Nice. But wow, the other plot. Big fat helping of do-not-want.

It's just so unnecessary! I understand from igenlode that it derives from the novel, but the tradeoff there seems to be Oedipal Freud instead of Hollywood DID and I just kind of want neither. I still feel it should have been possible for Felix to take on a case that was out of his expertise and have it go badly in a way that actually belonged to the rest of the plot.

[asakiyume]

Absolutely: it could be something that he can't do well because of an antipathy for the patient, for instance--maybe due to childhood trauma and/or his own baggage. Or someone who reminds him too much of himself. Or something where outside exigencies weigh too heavily, along the lines of "if you can get this person well in six sessions, the clinic gets a $100,000 grant"--but he realizes the person needs much more than that, etc. etc. Those sorts of things involve moral/ethical quandaries and plenty of opportunity for messing up without Oedipal complexes and TV-land schizophrenia and psycho-killing.

[sovay]

Those sorts of things involve moral/ethical quandaries and plenty of opportunity for messing up without Oedipal complexes and TV-land schizophrenia and psycho-killing.

I like all of your suggestions! Making the case too close to home for Felix would have fit right in with the conversations about therapists as people with the same problems as their clients while tying it to the clinic's finances would have meshed very well with the weird situation where he is simultaneously an asset and a liability.