Freud: The Secret Passion

Jean-Paul Sartre was the original screenwriter on Huston’s fascinating, profoundly strange Sigmund Freud biopic. (His last draft, written before the two parted ways, would have made for an eight-hour film.) The final product, something like a cross between a psychological drama and an expressionist horror movie, was Huston’s first film to deal directly with psychoanalysis since his wartime documentary Let There Be Light, and he depicts the talking cure alternately as a decadent luxury and a kind of mystical rite. Ultimately, the film belongs to Montgomery Clift, whose subtle, melancholic turn as Freud was his penultimate screen performance.