Pressure Point
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Movie Reviews of Pressure Point
Movie Review: Forgotten Powerful Film
Summary: 4 Stars
I saw this film in the 1970s and was totally drawn into the psycho-drama of its storyline. A recent viewing took nothing away from its strange power. Bobby Darin's excellent performance gives evidence to the unrealized potential of a long movie career. In my recent viewing, Darin's character reminded me of Lee Harvey Oswald. "Pressure Point" is told in a very unsensational manner which adds to its power. This manner lends added potency to the film's very disturbing bar scene, where Darin's character and a buddy matter-of-factly humiliate a woman. "Pressure Point" is a very successful film about a very disturbed mind.Movie Review: Overheated Melodrama Deals with the Paranoid Delusions of a Truly Hateful Convict
Summary: 3 Stars
Although the genesis of hate crimes is worthy of a film treatment, this heavy-handed 1962 melodrama is weighed down by too many theatrical flourishes to be as genuinely powerful as was once intended. Some critics at the time praised the bravery of such an undertaking, but one can see in hindsight how director Hubert Cornfield, who co-wrote the screenplay with Robert Lindner, doesn't seem to trust the basic material enough to provide a more straightforward telling of the case history of a psychopathic convict who hates non-Aryans with a virulent passion. To further depersonalize the plot, he doesn't even give the characters proper names. As a typically austere Stanley Kramer production, it has the earmarks of the high-minded social consciousness prevalent in the comparatively better films he made during this period - 1959's On the Beach about nuclear disarmament, 1961's Judgment at Nuremberg about the Nazi atrocities and 1963's A Child Is Waiting about mental retardation.
As a framing device for the central story, a chief psychiatrist is confronted by a frustrated staff doctor threatening to resign due to the seeming hopelessness of getting through to an anti-white black patient. Hoping to convince the younger doctor not to give up, the psychiatrist - who happens to be black - flashes back to a similarly difficult case he handled during WWII when he was forced to treat a Nazi supporter who was in jail for sedition. The convict is a vicious racist and anti-Semitic, who is suffering from a sleep disorder and blackouts. The bulk of the movie is the dialogue between the two over the course of the convict's three-year sentence. What emerges is a portrait of a pathetic man who had a miserable childhood that led to random acts of sadism and ultimately his membership in the American Nazi (Bund) party.
Fantasy sequences and documentary footage are liberally used to emphasize the convict's malignant nature with melodramatic excess. The film's turning point is the decision to release the unrepentant convict, which pits the heretofore becalmed psychiatrist against the prison authorities convinced he should be paroled. As late as this comes in the movie, it's the only point where Sidney Poitier's performance as the psychiatrist comes alive. In fact, his fury is so characteristically electrifying that he replicated the scene on a more subtle level in the father-son showdown in Kramer's later Guess Who's Coming to Dinner. As the convict, Bobby Darin gets the showier role, and while he is up to the challenge, he doesn't transcend it either. Peter Falk shows up briefly in the present-day scenes, while Carl Benton Reid adds some dimension to his small role as the chief medical officer. It all ends anti-climactically. The 2004 DVD offers no significant extras.
Movie Review: pretty good,but follows the Defiant Ones formula
Summary: 3 Stars
this was one of the early starts in the buddy,buddy type of film. Sidney Poitier is one of the Greatest Actors Ever. he truly does a Great Job in this film as does Bobby Darin. the film has alot of complexity's going on. Darin's negative/hateful vibe mixed with Poitier's straight forward presentation is a interesting mix that doesn't really pick up until a good hour into the film. this film deals with Race, Sex&class. Darin's sidewalk business is interesting with the Young Lady He attracts. when he is telling Poitier his life story that is really intense.but i do feel that the film follows the blue print of what Poitier&Tony Curtis did in 'The Definat ones". seeing Peter Faulk pre "columbo" is a real eye opener as well.Movie Review: A TRIP INTO THE MIND OF A PSYCHOPATH!
Summary: 3 Stars
I had heard many good things about this "explosive and provocative drama", so I decided to check this film out. While the performances are very good and story is interesting, this film about racism and psychological analysis is a bit dated. The artsy camerawork was probably something in it's day, but I found myself getting bored with some of the stagey tactics and monotonous screenplay. The DVD has a good transfer, but I found the audio to have a low bass flutter, making the voices a chore to hear.......this may have instigated my boredom.Movie Review: SUBTLE YET BRILLIANT PERFORMANCE BY BOBBY DARIN
Summary: 1 Stars
5 STARS : Crooner Bobby Darin gives a studied performance in this still relevant drama about a Nazi sympathizer. Sydney Poitier is uniformly superb as Darin's 1940s prison psychiatrist.
Darin is both manipulative and pathetic as the adult victim of childhood abuse. We are allowed to see how his pathological character is formed. Darin allows us to feel some sympathy for this despicable man.
We follow along and see how the Lee Harvey Oswalds and Timothy McVeys of the world all too easily walk among us.
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