Freud

John Huston - 1962 - USA

• While making the documentary Let There Be Light, about psychological trauma in soldiers returning from WWII, John Huston became intrigued by Freud's life and ideas and determined to make a film about him.

• Not a standard biography nor a documentary, the film is more of a concentrated dramatization of certain episodes in Freud's development of his theories.

• Penultimate film role for intense, fragile method actor Montgomery Clift, who had also appeared in Huston's The Misfits the previous year.  He seems a living, breathing neurosis here, probably not too much like Freud himself but a perfect avatar for Freud's ideas.

• One of the earliest film scores by Jerry Goldsmith, whose aggressive use of electronic sounds and dissonance resembles his concurrent work for the The Twilight Zone TV show.

• Douglas Slocombe's high-contrast cinematography is so extreme that it renders the film almost literally BLACK and WHITE, with little gray in between.  Sometimes human faces are mere shards of light in a field of black.