A Plea of Insanity
The development of film noir owed much to the popular fascination with psychoanalysis in postwar America, which fed stories about obsession, anxiety, and captivity to the past. But while 1940s melodramas such as Spellbound, Pursued, and The Locket indulged in glib Freud-for-dummies, one of the most subtle and intelligent treatments of psychoanalytic themes came at the very end of the classic noir cycle. Brainstorm (1965), a film as cunning and ambiguous as its central character, culminates in a complex battle of wits between a murderer and a female psychiatrist assigned to determine whether he is sane. He is trying to pass himself off as crazy, and to do so he keeps insisting that he is not. She seems to know this, and yet plays along—perhaps because she knows that his scheming cleverness is really a very sophisticated form of madness.
When the movie opens, Jim Grayam (Jeffrey Hunter) seems almost boringly sane. A cerebral, vaguely repressed young rocket scientist, he falls easy prey to Lorrie Benson (Anne Francis), the reckless, miserable young wife of the sadistic tycoon who runs Jim’s company. He discovers her unconscious in her car, parked on the railroad tracks, and any character who saves another character from a suicide attempt is obligated by the rules of melodrama to fall in love with that person. When they meet again, she shanghais him from his office to a wild party, and soon they are furtively meeting and declaring their love for each other. Of course Jim wants to rescue Lorrie from the oppressive control of her husband, whose brutality is all the more vile for being soft and insinuating. As Cort Benson, Dana Andrews—usually sympathetic even in his darker roles—proves surprisingly adept at making us hate this overbearing, self-satisfied bully.
The tycoon has a devious plan to get rid of his young rival: he starts gaslighting Jim, staging situations that make it look like he is losing his marbles. Benson exploits the fact that as a teenager Jim had a breakdown and spent time in a sanitarium; now his concerned friends urge him to see a psychiatrist. At first he’s baffled and furious, but then Jim has his brainstorm: he can turn the tables on Benson by laying the groundwork for an insanity plea, then killing his tormentor in cold blood. He bones up on psychological maladies at the library and even practices lying under sodium pentathol.
The first hint that there might really be something wrong with Jim comes when he grudgingly visits a psychiatrist, the beautiful and preternaturally calm Dr. Larstadt (Viveca Lindfors). Something about her cool, opaque, here-to-help friendliness, or about the atmosphere of the mirrored room where an emotionally disturbed boy plays with blocks, makes Jim snap and throw an angry fit. In the end, Dr. Larstadt is perhaps the most ambiguous character of all. There’s no real reason to think she’s anything but a smart, dedicated professional, yet there’s something about her smiling reserve that makes you wonder what she’s really up to, if she’s out to help him or to get him. Or are we seeing her through Jim’s eyes? Viveca Lindfors, an always interesting actress with a number of fine, offbeat credits (These are the Damned, Weddings and Babies, Four in a Jeep), is not talked about enough. For an actress she is strangely hard to read, with an intelligence like a two-way mirror that takes in more than it gives away.
For his part, Jeffrey Hunter seizes the chance to prove that he’s more than a pretty face. If he seems bland at first, it adds excitement to the prickle of suspicion that begins as you realize there’s something too tightly wound behind his knotted brow and small, ice-chip eyes. Hunter draws an intricate diagram of a brilliant but unsound mind, revealing layers of feigned and real mania. As his scheme proceeds, it becomes gradually more and more evident that Jim is missing some fundamental component of sanity—perhaps something as simple as common sense—but he’s still, agonizingly, sane enough to be horrified when his successful masquerade lands him in an asylum full of the hopeless demented. All of whom, of course, insist that they’re not crazy.
Brainstorm was one of only two feature films directed by William Conrad, the well-known character actor turned prolific television director (and voice of The Fugitive’s credit sequence). His work here keeps a tight focus on the script and performances, which is exactly what’s called for, but the absence of a well-known director may be one reason the film is too little known. Another is its date. Brainstorm is a chronological outlier to the classic noir cycle, but it firmly belongs there, and the reason it does is also a key to the end of that cycle.
Put simply, to be noir a film must delve into the psychology, the interiority, of its characters; it must peer into what Wilfred Thesiger (in the seminal 1939 British noir They Drive By Night) calls “the crepuscular recesses of the human mind.” The psychological complexity, dense ambiguity, and intense, tortured emotion of Brainstorm are precisely the elements that drained out of crime movies at the beginning of the 1960s, with the turn to cool, amoral detachment. Brainstorm is not a warm movie, and it ends chillingly with the hysterical hero surrounded and subdued by the forces of calm clinical authority. With its black-and-white widescreen format, taking in the bland corporate modernism of southern California, the film looks like other TV-influenced late-period noirs. But it is a story that draws us into the workings of a mind, as convoluted and murky as the settings are sterile and flat. The real noir landscape is always inside.
by Imogen Sara Smith