| Freud: The Secret Passion | |
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Theatrical poster |
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| Directed by | John Huston |
| Produced by | Wolfgang Reinhardt |
| Written by | Charles Kaufman (story) Wolfgang Reinhardt |
| Narrated by | John Huston |
| Starring | Montgomery Clift Susannah York Susan Kohner |
| Music by | Jerry Goldsmith |
| Cinematography | Douglas Slocombe |
| Editing by | Ralph Kemplen |
| Distributed by | Universal Pictures |
| Release date(s) | 12 December 1962 |
| Running time | 139 minutes |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
Freud: The Secret Passion, also known as Freud, is a 1962 American biographical film drama based on the life of Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, directed by John Huston and starring Montgomery Clift as Freud. The original script was written by Jean-Paul Sartre, but Sartre withdrew his involvement in the film after disagreements with Huston, and his name was removed from the credits.[1] The film was entered into the 13th Berlin International Film Festival.[2]
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This pseudo-biographical movie depicts Sigmund Freud's life from 1885 to 1890. At this time, most of his colleagues refuse to treat hysteric patients, believing their symptoms to be ploys for attention. Freud, however, learns to use hypnosis to uncover the reasons for the patients' neuroses. His main patient in the film is a young woman who refused to drink water and is plagued by a recurrent nightmare.
The story compresses the years it took Freud (Montgomery Clift) to develop his psychoanalytic theories into what seems like a few months. Nearly every neurotic symptom imaginable manifests itself in one patient, Cecily Koertner (Susannah York). She is sexually repressed, hysterical, and fixated on her father. Freud works extensively with her, developing one hypothesis after another. Also shown is Freud's home life with his wife Martha (Susan Kohner), whom he alternately discusses his theories with and patronizes when she reads one of his papers.
In 1958, John Huston decided to make a film about the life of the young Sigmund Freud, and asked Jean-Paul Sartre to write a summary of a projected scenario. Sartre submitted a synopsis of 95 pages, which was accepted, but later completed a finished script that Huston considered far too long. Huston suggested cuts, but Sartre submitted an even longer script. Huston and Sartre quarelled, and Sartre withdrew his name from the film's credits.[1]
Élisabeth Roudinesco comments that Freud: The Secret Passion, "did not have any success. And yet the black and white photography of Douglas Slocombe recaptures superbly the baroque universe of fin de siècle Vienna. As for Montgomery Clift, he portrays an anguished, somber and fragile Freud, closer to the James Dean of Rebel without a Cause than to the mummified figure imposed by the official historians of psychoanalysis: a character, in any event, more Sartrean than Jonesian. The work was distributed to the movie houses of Paris at the beginning of June 1964, two weeks before Lacan's foundation of the Ėcole freudienne de Paris. It went completely unnoticed by the psychoanalysts of Paris, who failed to find in it the hero of their imagination."[1] Sartre did not see the film.[3]
The mostly dissonant, atonal score to Freud was one of the earliest works by composer Jerry Goldsmith. It garnered Goldsmith his first Oscar nomination, which he lost to fellow rookie composer Maurice Jarre for Lawrence Of Arabia who, like Goldsmith, would go on to become one of the film industry's most successful and respected composers. The "Main Title" from Freud was later purchased and reused without consent of Jerry Goldsmith by director Ridley Scott for the acid blood scene in the film Alien (1979), also scored by Goldsmith.[4]