Blind Alley (1939)

Blind Alley (1939) is a psychoanalytic home invasion psychopath on the run crime film noir directed by Charles Vidor and stars Chester Morris, Ralph Bellamy and Ann Dvorak. The film was adapted from the Broadway play of the same name by James Warwick.

Blind Alley may well be a fairly unique prospect — it appears to be a fully-enough formed film noir production — produced at a time before the film noir style and approach was fully formed.

In terms of solid film noir elements we do have a few firm foundations in place which must classify Blind Alley as a film noir.

Firstly, Blind Alley features psychoanalysis as the tool which solves the crime, and gets to the bottom of the psychopathic criminal's dilemma.

Psychoanalysis and psychopathy were to become two of the mainstays of the style and Blind Alley is replete with both. The dream symbols of Freud are here grafted on to the action in a fashion which is perfectly suited to noir — as demonstrated in the dream sequences which accompany the analysis.

Ralph Bellamy in Blind Alley (1939)

If it had not been observed much before in cinema, it was demonstrable in Blind Alley that Freudian imagery, combined with stark and expressionistic stage sets and camera special effects was going to be an excellent medium for expressing mid century doubt, criminality and the newfound ways of interpreting the newfound stresses and multi-layered complexities of modernity.

Chester Morris in Blind Alley (1939)

Hal Wilson, played by Chester Morris, is a late 1930s movie psychopath who never seemed to have received any of the memos about the Production Code. Although he acts tough and pushed people about when he can, Hal's abiding MO in Blind Alley (1939) is the cold-blooded and rather unnecessarily cruel murders he carries out.

Marc Lawrence in Blind Alley (1945)

There are two of these of note in the picture — one near the top when he guns down the hostage from the gang's prison break — the governor of the prison — and a second one later, when he guns down a defenceless student who has humiliated one of his gang members (played by Marc Lawrence) in a fist fight. 

What these murders have in common, aside from their gratuitous nature, is the fact that killer Hal Wilson seems to spend a couple of seconds deep in thought before pulling the trigger, an excellent touch which seems to be suggestive of the analytic conversations which are going to be the logical foil to the untamed criminality.

Home Invasion Film Noir — Blind Alley (1939)

Blind Alley is also pioneering in its approach as a home invasion movie — a genre that was going to become more popular as the film noir style developed and evolved. There is more to these style of films than the mere aspect of us and them, and it is clear that the more America domesticated itself first with the radio set and the growth of the suburban dream, and ultimately with the television, that there was more of a place for this kind of story.

Hal Wilson is desperately in need of psychoanalysis, and although we know he is going to die for his crimes, it is at least interesting that he is going to die at peace with his criminality and his extreme pain, as well as at peace with his past, having come to understand the reasons for it  because of some cod analysis, delivered to a soon-to-be-hungry-for-more audience.

Pipes versus cigarettes is the real face-off in Blind Alley (1939)

The reason audiences were going to be hungry for more psychoanalysis is of course that as well as offering modern, liberal and scientifically technical reasons for criminality and crime, such analysis is of course one of the best ways to approach and make sense of storytelling itself.

That is to say, that in film noir, above all other forms, the logic of each story and the mechanics of each telling of the story can be usefully interpreted by analysis. There would have been no fully fledged and vital film noir style had it not been for the rise of psychoanalysis, which had begun to feed its way into popular culture, even if people were not aware if it, and not in the least through advertising techniques, as well as in stories such as this one.

Ralph Bellamy and the authority of the pipe in Blind Alley (1939)

In Blind Alley (1939), Hal Wilson as a nervous and troubled personality, angry suffering bad dreams and a  constant fear of the unknown. Shelby, the analyst seems infuriatingly calm, though he gradually finds respect for him as a belief grows on him that he's somehow stumbled onto the one person who can help him.

This being the 1930s / 40s the two men are of course contrasted early on by the means of their smoking habits. As the figure of authority and knowledge, and the man of science and reason, Shelby is deliberately shown in one scene smoking a pipe in contrast to the violent gangster's cigarette — a cigarette that is roughly demolished once the contrast becomes too unbearable.

Marc Lawrence in Blind Alley (1945)

There is more going on in this small smoker's exchange than that however — with an entire history of class frustration being expressed, encapsulated in the smooth smugness of the pipe, which is simply by dint of its appearance in the hand of a bourgeois, seen as a symbol of success, almost as powerful in the hand of this clinician as a firearm is the hand of a gangster.

The pipe carries yet more weight still, suggestive of quite contentment and here, clearly, the kind of peace that the gangster mind is never going to find. 

The earliest days of psychoanalysis in the US were marked by doubt in its efficacy as a general tool. Most psychiatrists in this era were asylum keepers, and few were involved in outpatient practice, which was restricted to neurologists. 

Ann Dvorak in Blind Alley (1939)

The psychoanalytic revolution in psychiatry opened up the field to the private practice setting and to the treatment of less seriously ill patients. Prior to the introduction of psychoanalysis in the US, most psychiatrists treated more psychotically disturbed and hospitalised patients.

In the US the practice of psychoanalysis was restricted to physicians, whereas psychoanalysis in Europe and elsewhere was practiced from its early days by lay analysts, its practice in the US was for many years limited to psychiatrists. 

Psychoanalytic schematic of the human mind in Blind Alley (1939)

Through the 1940s psychoanalysis gained more influence, and its scope broadened to schizophrenia, manic depression, and other psychiatric conditions. However at the same time, psychoanalysis was now being applied to non-psychiatric problems, as well as to such things as the effects of war, racism, and other social problems.

A number of factors contributed to the eventual downfall of psychoanalysis in the 1970s and 1980s, such as rapid advances that were made in psychopharmacology, the increasing influence of managed care, and a trend towards the medicalisation of issues previously considered psychological or psychosocial in their origin. 

Explanatory dream-sequence from a criminal mind in Blind Alley (1939)

Additionally, critics of psychoanalysis contend that the discipline became increasingly dogmatic in its approach and expanded beyond its proper scope. The antipsychiatry movement of the 1960s further damaged the reputation of psychoanalysis as a branch of psychiatric medicine.

Blind Alley was remade as The Dark Past in 1948, with William Holden and Lee J. Cobb. The remake was also released by Columbia Pictures but is notable for being absolutely identical in several respects, largely the dream sequences — although the rather ridiculous psychoanalytic drawing of the human mind is also the same — the pseudoscience of psychotherapy having clearly made no technical advances in the intervening decade. 

Blind Alley (1939) at Wikipedia