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“David and Lisa” (1962)
Hollywood seems reluctant to ignore a good story about mental illness as the actors are given to unleashing the hounds in roles that are traditional award magnets, while directors are afforded the opportunity to extend their visual vocabulary to heightened
aesthetic exaggerations depicting the (usually) frenzied mental state of the character (the Salvador Dali designed funhouse ride dreams of “Spellbound”) or the nightmarish condition of their institutional environs (the Bosch/Busby Berkeley flavored tableaux of “The Snake Pit”).
With “David and Lisa”, Frank Perry, in his directorial debut, initially sheds the self-consciously stylized baggage most filmmakers indulge in with similar material, favoring an impressively unobtrusive, pseudo-documentary style in which there is a genuine respect for the process of quiet observation and listening as a means to achieve real understanding, and secure emotional intimacy.
David Clemens (Keir Dullea) is a highly intelligent young man who suffers from a pathological terror of physical contact. As he is introduced, he is being placed as a resident of a psychiatric youth treatment facility, though there is never an attempt to specifically identify his or any of the other residents’ actual psychological disorders; which by all available evidence, seems to involve different forms of discomfort with normal social interaction (though the same could be said of any high school cafeteria, so
the lack of more clinical reference points is not helpful in appreciating the film’s set-up). David is arrogantly antisocial, dismissing the thoughts and interest of others as insignificant, but is obsessed with the mechanics of timepieces and suffers from obvious obsessive compulsive behavior. His emotional isolation finds relief when he falls into an empathetic relationship with fellow resident Lisa Brandt (Janet Margolin), an energetic adolescent girl who apparently can only speak through childish rhyming verse, but who also suffers sudden shifts into a more withdrawn and mute personality (communicating solely through writing), identifying herself as Muriel. Lisa’s suffering from schizophrenia (as it is identified by David during
one of his early smarty-pants pronouncements) suggests that the center’s patient roster acknowledges the presence of patients suffering from acute biological not restricted to simple behavioral disorders but also acute biological disorders.
The movie has all of the earmarks of not being the usual coming-of-age film in that each of the eponymous adolescents are afflicted with severe mental illness beyond the usual realms of teen alienation and discontentment, though none of problematic psychological aberrations are dealt with in a manner which is particularly deep nor convincing, especially since the very real disorders find miraculous resolution by the finale without even particularly insightful therapeutic intercession but merely through the slightest demonstration of mutual attraction. This “love conquers all” messaging undercuts the initially unforced sincerity of Perry’s passivity in his documentation of events and surrenders the final act of the
film to both a bizarre pseudo-noirish visual hysteria and overt Hollywood melodrama.
If Perry’s initial approach to the material grants a dignity to the material with a minimal intrusion of directorial flourishes, there are unfortunate exceptions: a pair of dream sequences which make explicit (and the staging of which resemble scenes more apropos to a fantasy-based vehicle such as “The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T”) David’s subconscious clockwork fantasies whose delineation would be better served with additional shared dialogue between patient and therapist (the extraordinary scene in Bergman’s “Persona” where Alma recounts a erotic encounter attests to the potential of simple dialogue as the most powerful and direct stimulus to the viewer’s imagination). Since there is an insufficiency of time allotted in the dramatization of the crucial relationship between David and Dr. Swinford (Howard Da Silva)- sessions that would provide a profound definition to 
David’s condition and progress -these dream sequences become a needless visual redundancy detracting from a more detailed exploration of the greater psychological complexities of his case. (With that observation in mind, the film is generally scant on addressing the exact nature of the any of the case histories of any of David’s fellow students, resulting in confusion on how to react to several instances of the students being shunned or berated by “outsiders”. If they are treated as a threat to the community, is that perception merited?) The credible therapeutic path trod by the film becomes too pat by half.
However, it is in the film’s finale where Perry indulges in a complete last minute abandonment of his clinician’s view of the drama versus that of the audience pleasing sensationalist. In a sequence in which a distraught Lisa flees the treatment center, there is a sudden violent stylistic shift in editing and camerawork that may very well mirror Lisa’s state of emotional turmoil, but since Perry has chosen to observe his characters objectively, such a sudden infusion of subjective hysteria is inconsistent and ill-suited in demonstrating Lisa’s imperilment coming from
within her own mind rather than through some external descent into a Luciferian urban abyss. This sudden aesthetic shift may have seemed necessary to the director and his adaptive screenwriter Eleanor Perry in making the creakier material from Theodore Isaac Rubin’s source novel more workable and masquerading its deficiencies by the manufacturing of a unmerited cathartic experience wholly out of technical trickery. (Unfortunately, the script’s penchant for playing every scene like an isolated vignette rather than a contributory, formative element to fully developed narrative arc, often makes the film feel like a series of unrelated blackout sketches.) None of this explains, nor excuses, the end of the film; a product of pure Hollywood hokum which (if anyone notices) undercuts everything that has transpired before, substituting pure corn for substantive psychic relief.
Throughout the film, Perry’s one unquestionable asset are the performances of his principals: Dullea, Margolin and Da Silva (special mention should also go to Clifton James as Lisa’s eternally patient counselor/companion John, whose interaction with his charge provides the film with many of its most tender moments), each of whom is unafraid to allow their characters to show more questionable sides; whether in David’s 
unanswered abrasiveness or, in Dr. Swinford’s case, the initial impression of professional timidity. Perry allows the camera to linger on the faces of his actors, whom he obviously adores, and they reciprocate this directorial trust with skillful nuances that inform their characters in ways the screenplay never approaches. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of the contributions of music composer Mark Lawrence, who finds every opportunity to punctuate dramatic developments with an avalanche of hysterical bombast; demonstrating, through his ruinous negative achievement, that some films would benefit immensely with the absence of scoring. 
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“The Mummy” (1932)
The first of the major Universal sound horror films which relied upon the invention of screenwriters rather than a direct literary predecessor, Karl Freund’s “The Mummy” enjoys the luxury in the depiction of the title creature’s origin backstory and continued tale of menace without the critical distraction of source comparisons. That being said, it
is remarkable as to how many elements of the film seem vaguely familiar, as if directly lifted, by way of clever transposition, from previous successes, most prominently Tod Browning’s “Dracula”. That Freund, the earlier film’s cinematographer, is promoted to the director’s chair and actors David Manners, Edward Van Sloane are prominently featured in both films, certainly contributes to a certain air of déjà vu; but it is the presence of John Balderston which accounts for the prematurely formulaic sense of reincarnated genre tropes to which the film is attributable (he managed to make a stuffy drawing room drama out of Stoker’s seminal novel, from which every incarnation since has immeasurably suffered).
In 1921, a group of archeologists, including Sir Joseph Whemple (Arthur Byron) and an expert in occultism Dr. Muller (Edward Van Sloan) under the sponsorship of the British Museum, make some remarkable finds in an Egyptian dig (despite early exchanges in which characters complain, with contradictory fervor, that their labors have yielded kittle of value!); a perfectly preserved mummy of the high priest Imhotep (Boris Karloff), and a mysterious chest whose contents are protected by a dire caution of
death. As though he were unfamiliar with lesson to be learned from the tale of Pandora’s Box, Sir Joseph’s assistant, the foolhardy Ralph Norton (Bramwell Fletcher), reveals the contents of the casket (Just how would horror films thrive without the cooperation of rational people who recklessly run headfirst to their doom?), the Scroll of Thoth, imprinted with forbidden holy words of resurrection, the substance of which the film foolishly opens, making the text sound like a Pep Squad chant for ancient deities. The revived mummy, shocks the startled Norton into a paroxysm of insane laughter. from which he never recovers; though just how the shuffling Imhotep manages to elude both Sir Joseph and Dr. Muller, who are standing just outside the entrance to the chamber, is a mystery.
Jumping ahead ten years, Imhotep, under the guise of an Egyptian named Ardath Bey, approaches the site of another British dig, this time headed by Sir Joseph’s son Frank (David Manners) whose attention is immediately captured when the mysterious stranger informs him of the heretofore undiscovered location of tomb of Princess Ankh-
es-en-amon, who, it will be revealed, was Imhotep’s secret love and the subject of his thwarted forbidden attempt at resurrection, leading to his live entombment. The excavation and exhibition of the tomb’s artifacts will lead to a not always coherent path of telepathically induced deaths, fleeting and unconvincing romance and an attempt by Imhotep to reestablish his romance with the princess with the appearance of a half-Egyptian woman named Helen (Zita Johann) is immediately recognized by the priest as the reincarnation of the princess and whose convenient presence lays the foundation for the more preposterous events of the narrative to transpire, while abandoning the earlier establishment of an indiscriminate supernatural curse befalling the transgressors of the films initial archeological finds.
As mentioned earlier, the film follows a similar simplistic narrative formula in which screenwriter Balderston established a comfortable recipe for success despite the eradication of the source material’s grandiosity of Gothic underpinnings (in “Dracula”) and themes (in “Frankenstein”). With “The “Mummy”, we find Balderston cannibalizing his streamlining method of reducing sensational material with ethereal overtones and 
bringing it crashing down to earth by reducing exotic theological concepts to dull cocktail party chatter. His evisceration of Bram Stoker’s event filled novel have been duplicated with a startling fidelity that, has it been administered by another author, might have been grounds for plagiarism. Here we have the introduction, in the face of rational enterprise, of an undead figure from centuries past, who drives his initial mortal enabler to madness; then there is the pursuit of a woman, who has as her watchdogs a trio of erudite but fairly helpless academics, including an eminent scientist, a know-it-all expert on all matters of the otherworldly and a completely ineffectual romantic partner with whom there is little or no visible personal chemistry. Both films also feature nocturnal contacts with the increasingly fragile woman when she is at her most vulnerable. Finally, there is the climactic imperilment of the lady in the lair of the villain in order to
secure her as an eternal companion; necessitating a breathless (in theory, though in both films the pursuit is rather wheezy and pokey) last minute pursuit of and confrontation with the forces of darkness. Structurally, the two films are carbon copies, differentiated only by cultural differences of timeframe and geography (the Balkans versus Egypt), though the goals of the protagonist and the actions of his antagonists are virtually identical, as Balderston continually proves himself a timid translator of material with both feet in the realm of the fantastic, by relegating the proceedings to a middlebrow sensibility beholden to the tropes of drawing room drama. What results is a film which is, in essence, simply the latest incarnation of the melodramatic love triangle thinly veiled in mummy’s bandages
Freund’s direction is sufficiently imaginative in the sequences emphasizing the more shadowy elements of the story (though an entire flashback sequence dramatizing Imhotep’s transgression and punishment, is ineffectively staged), though he seems defeated by the more conventional passages (as was Tod Browning in “Dracula”) related to endless conversational exposition (too often characters ceaselessly argue over what is going on that we already know), not to mention the supposed romantic interludes between Helen and Frank which are, to say the least, awkwardly written and performed with equal unease by Johann and Manners in a manner best described as “mutually
forced shotgun wedding’. For a film whose subject encompasses an unquenchable passion which transcends millennia, there is a surprising dearth of unsullied romantic expression. Imhotep, while a villainous character, should also be regarded as a pitiable figure whose wholly human emotions have been grotesquely disfigured through unnatural circumstances. However, Imhotep is unsparingly used as a figure of menace and there is not a single moment in Karloff’s performance which elicits sympathy, with Freund instead mistakenly fixated entirely on the actor’s unquestioned ability to unnerve. The film might have been an unique horror tragedy of an eternal yet unrequited love, but without allowing a broadening of the characters of Imhotep as anything more than a fez wearing boogeyman (Certainly the modern day incarnation of amour between Helen and Frank feels perfunctory at best, with Johann and Manners generating all of the fire of a bucket of water thrown on an unlit match.), the film emerges as merely a fleetingly interesting but disappointingly generic spook show.
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