Freud

John Huston originally commissioned a screenplay about Sigmund Freud from Jean-Paul Sartre. It proved overlong and unwieldy and the ultimate film came closer to one of the respectful Warner Bros biopics of great men on which both Huston and the film's German-born producer, Wolfgang Reinhardt, had worked in the 1930s. Set in Vienna in the 1880s, it's about what Huston in his prologue portentously describes as "Freud's descent into a region almost as black as hell itself, man's unconscious and how he let in light". In his penultimate screen appearance, a troubled but generally impressive Montgomery Clift plays the young neurologist who challenges the medical establishment, moving from hypnosis towards psychoanalysis and developing his revolutionary theories, most especially about infantile sexuality and the Oedipus complex.

Susannah York and David McCallum play two key patients, with the long-blacklisted Larry Parks as Freud's friend Joseph Breuer. Douglas Slocombe's black-and-white photography is superbly atmospheric. It's a serious, honourable film that makes an interesting comparison with David Cronenberg's recent Freud film, A Dangerous Method.