I found the scene with the bar hostess to be one of the most disturbing scenes in any movie I've ever seen. The cool sadism with which she is treated, and her own resignation to her treatment, are more frightening than what one normally finds in a run-of-the-mill horror movie. One of the lessons I inferred is that we must never tolerate such cruelty to ourselves or to anyone else.
shareI remember just before the "game" started on her, the bar owner looked at her when he was told to lie down and go to sleep, and she nodded, as if to say it is alright. She endured it stoically at first, but looked very upset when they began to strip her to play another game of tic tac toe on her bare back. The bar hostess (actually whore, as the "patient" implied when he said "she was probably making more money than he was." And she had said to him "come and play with me.") was played by Mary Munday, who was a decade older than Darin but long outlived him, until her own death in 1997. It seems that the tic tac toe scene involving Munday was repeated or changed a few times; I've seen pictures of the scene which didn't appear in the movie.
shareI also noted that before they played on her, they made her play with them, giving her a paint brush and forcing her to help vandalize the bar. I was reminded of old newsreel footage from Nazi Germany showing uniformed Nazis making Jews write anti-Semitic slogans on the walls and doors of their own stores and homes.
shareI don't recall Munday's character being forced to vandalize the bar. She and the owner just watched helplessly while those prohibition era toughs wrecked the whole place by playing tic tac toe everywhere.
shareThere are several shots of her using a paintbrush to participate in the "game."
The expression on her face and the fact that at times she is being held by one of the thugs indicate that she is "playing" under duress.
I saw PP several times and don't remember such scenes. She was aghast at the mess they were making but as far as I can remember, she just stood there helplessly.
shareAt the beginning of the scene, she's given a paintbrush by "Pete," one of the older thugs, who makes her play on a mirror. Each time he makes a move he tells her, "It's your turn," and that ultimately becomes Bobby Darin's chant throughout the game. When the other thugs go outside after destroying the bar, she continues to paint under Pete's supervision. After he leaves, the remaining thugs begin to undress and play on her.
shareI have PP on VHS so I'll watch it again; that's not the way I remember it. Btw, what do you think of the very start, before the actual film begins-the white bars and eerie sounds? Makes it seem like some sci fi horror flick.
shareYou're right. It reminds me of the opening of a low-budget horror film from the '50s, or the opening of Thriller, the horror anthology series hosted by Boris Karloff in the early sixties. And the opening is appropriate, since Bobby Darin's character embodies more pure evil than any character I've ever seen in an explicit horror film. The decision to film in black and white was also good--evil doesn't appear quite so evil in color.
shareI think the eerie sounding opening reflected the patient's bizarre mental disturbance. He was smart in some ways but under the circumstances he should have realized he was in a lost cause. There was no way the people would support his kind of movement after it had become associated with the enemy. (Indeed the Bund faded in WWII)And he should have realized that the Axis had lost the war in the period in which he grappled with the doctor-1942-43. Darin said that blacks wouldn't achieve equality for "another 5500 years" but ironically their progress was accelerated by people like the patient. The association of racist ideology with the enemy helped the cause of blacks in the postwar period.
Lastly, Darin appeared as a total ingrate for persisting in his racist views even after benefitting from the black doctor's treatment.
I thought that The Patient's rascism and nazism were acquired only incidentally. His upbringing made him a violence-prone sociopath, and only his chance encounters with a Jewish family and a nazi cell made him use nazism as an excuse to perpetrate violence and other antisocial behavior. Under different circumstances he might have become a communist or a member of an extremist group using violence to promote ecology or animal rights. I suspect that such a character would taunt Sidney Poitier's Psychiatrist only to get a rise out of him rather than out of sincere yet misguided beliefs in racial superiority.
shareI was a bit surprised that the patient didn't try to fool the doctor into thinking he had changed, just as he fooled the rest of the prison medical staff, to increase his chances of release. Not that it was ultimately necessary, but it would've been prudent. Darin could have claimed that he no longer had "the same rotten ideas" since in the time since he had last seen the doctor, he had repudiated them, largely out of gratitude to the black man, who had cured his sleep disorder, and due to the realization that blacks had something worthwhile to contribute.
shareI think Darin's character knew he could more effectively humiliate The Psychiatrist by refusing to pretend he had repented. Poitier's character then had to live with the fact that the other doctors had taken the word of Darin's character over his own.
shareYes, and Darin's character may have thought it would be too hard to fool a pro shrink like Poitier's character, especially since he was by then very familiar with the patient and his views. It does strike me as a bit unrealistic, though, that the patient continued to believe his movement could still win out,since the Nazis were fast losing by the time he was released-presumably autumn 1943- and any prewar appeal of the Bund movement had been wiped out by its identification with the wartime enemy. Also, the help he had received from the doctor should have caused any intelligent person to reassess his ideas in light of it.
shareYou make some interesting points. But I don't see him as a left-winger type. The kind of violent, abusive upbringing he had tends to produce right-wing sociopaths who have no conscience and love hurting other people because they themselves suffered such pain and torment growing up. Adolf Hitler is the prime example of this. His father was a cruel, brutal, violent authoritarian type who beat the crap out of young Adolf at every turn. This kind of treatment produces rigid, authoritarian minds which gravitate to the political Right. It gives them the opportunity to do to the weak what was done to them when they were weak themselves, as part of a group that glorifies violence, intolerance and hatred. It gives them an outlet to transfer all their pain and hurt onto other people. And while Communists and other left-of-center types can certainly be violent in their actions, they tend to justify it to themselves and others by saying they're doing it for "the people" or "the whales" or "the environment" They tend to have social consciences, whereas right-wing extremists don't.
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