Vicious murderer William Holden and his gang break into the lodge of the pipe-smoking psychiatrist Lee J. Cobb, who is having guests. Holden and the gang hold them hostage. Holden, as it develops, is having some mental problems. Cobb quickly cures him and Holden is never able to fire a gun again and he is free of symptoms and nightmares and is led off peacefully to jail.<br /><br />It's a tough slog. Every piece of work has to be judged in terms of its period, we know, but this may have been fatigued even by 1950 standards. We had, after all, already had Hitchcock's "Spellbound", of which this is more or less a copy. These days, after a decade or two of "getting in touch with our feelings" (what does that MEAN?) it looks more dated and more schematic than ever.<br /><br />The Freudian version of psychoanalysis was the canon at the time. A psychiatrist had to read ALL of Freud's seventeen volumes of work and know them inside and out. And this story sticks to material that might be found in "Psychoanalysis for Dummies." Everything is laid out for the audience, beginning with the conscious and the unconscious, and later leading through a handbook of dream interpretation and even dabbling with the Oedipal complex, although that part isn't gone into to any great extent. Let's take into account the sensibilities of the audience. Let's just have Holden kill his father, steal his father's "gun", and live happily at home with his mother.<br /><br />The quick cure we see was always mythological. Just ask Woody Allan. Not that it hasn't been tried with psychoanalytic theory. When it became clear that very few people could afford to throw away a fortune on an unending psychoanalysis, psychiatrists developed other, shorter forms of treatment. One of them, William ("Wild Bill") Murphy invented sector therapy, which was a kind of psychoanalytic quick fix, a band aid rather than an psychological excavation. I lost track of the evaluative literature but sector therapy probably had the same success rate as its model.<br /><br />It would be nice to say that, despite the datedness of the material, it's well done, but that, alas, isn't the case. Rudolph Mate's direction is uninspired. The subplots are mechanical. The acting is perfunctory, though we have to say that Lee J. Cobb is a good psychiatrist. A little adventurous, true, but under the circumstances, such as having a pistol pressed against his belly -- well. Nina Foch is good as Holden's necessarily motherly girl friend too. William Holden gives the hammiest performance of his career, popping his eyes, grimacing, calling everything "screwy." Too bad. It has a fine noirish title -- "The Dark Past." But this past was prologue to nothing.