B Noir: The Dark Past and My Name Is Julia Ross

It’s not the obsession with Freud that’s the problem with Rudolph Maté’s 1948 noir The Dark Past.

B Noir: The Dark Past and My Name Is Julia Ross
Photo: Columbia Pictures

It’s not the obsession with Freud that’s the problem with Rudolph Maté’s 1948 noir The Dark Past but its lecture-hall hauteur. There’s a hilarious scene in the film in which a psychologist teacher played by Lee J. Cobb explains to an escaped con (William Holden) the difference between the conscious and unconscious mind before striking a comparison between these two parts of the mind and the upper and lower parts of an iceberg. A feeling of déjà vu during this scene led me (consciously) to Manny Farber’s Negative Space and—voila!—this excerpt from “The Gimp”: “Well, icebergs of a sort, one-tenth image, action, plot, nine-tenths submerged ‘insights’ à la Freud or Jung, Marx or Lerner, Sartre or Saroyan, Frost, Dewey, Auden, Mann, or whomever else the producer’s been reading.” I quote Farber here because it’s comforting to know that there were people like him who felt equally condescended to by these gloppy Freud-obsessed productions when they first premiered. In short, a film that doesn’t arouse the senses—less a movie than a trip to the psychologist’s couch. I experienced more déjà vu during Joseph H. Lewis’s My Name Is Julia Ross, which stars Dark Past’s Nina Foch as a woman who’s hired as a secretary by a rich biddy (Dame May Whitty) and her son as part of a murder-covering suicide scheme. Lewis gets you rooting quickly and fiercely for Foch, who’s just amazing here. The film is loads of fun but isn’t as viscerally exciting as other films in the Jane Eyre School of Gothic Melo-Noir like Fritz Lang’s little-seen, Suspiria-inspiring The Secret Beyond the Door.

Ed Gonzalez

Ed Gonzalez is the co-founder of Slant Magazine. A member of the New York Film Critics Circle, his writing has appeared in The Village Voice, The Los Angeles Times, and other publications.

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