Blind Alley

Based on James Warwick’s stage play and one of the very earliest films to explore psychotherapy, Charles Vidor’s Blind Alley dives deep into Freudianism through a plot revolving around the interpretation of dreams, in this case a recurring dream involving rain, bars, and an umbrella. The dreamer is Hal Wilson (Chester Morris), a violent escaped convict and murderer who, aided by his girlfriend Mary (Ann Dvorak) and a small posse, invades the suburban home of a psychiatrist and holds the inhabitants hostage: Dr. Shelby (Ralph Bellamy), his wife Doris (Rose Stradner), and their little son Davy (Scotty Beckett), who, upon first seeing Wilson’s firearm, excitedly asks him to “shoot something.” After an evening of terrorizing, threatening, or killing everyone in the house, Wilson eventually and reluctantly opens up with Shelby about the nightmare that’s been tormenting him, which Shelby makes his mission to decode as a potential route to winning him over. Protested by Mary, the final therapy session takes the form of gorgeous dream sequences that include negative exposures, surreal set designs, shadowy expressionism, and other exaggerated visual forms. The terminally underappreciated Marc Lawrence plays Wilson’s associate Buck, who snarls impatiently in almost every scene. William Holden and Lee J. Cobb played the lead roles in Rudolph Maté’s remake, The Dark Past (1948), widely considered inferior to Vidor’s original.