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.
( Tell him to go away and drain somebody else's blood because I need mine! )
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.
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.
( Tell him to go away and drain somebody else's blood because I need mine! )
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.
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