The Dark Past

A movie star remake of 1939’s proto-noir Blind Alley, The Dark Past substitutes that film’s sweaty intensity for a glossier approach. The results are a mixed bag as William Holden does well as the psychologically fraught prison escapee while Lee J. Cobb overacts, as was his wont, as the college professor-turned-interrogator. The Freudian psychobabble hasn’t aged particularly well, and there isn’t much meat on the film’s bones, either.

The nondescript direction, you’d be forgiven for mistaking this as a filmed play, and clunky dialog is part of the problem, but so is the uneven acting. A good director can take various types of actors and make them congeal into a whole or use the different styles as a method for generating dynamism between the characters. Cobb is an acquired taste that needs a big canvas to work on, and he worked best opposite steady hands like Henry Fonda or towering Method players like Marlon Brando, but this part seems ill-suited to his abilities and he comes across as pedantic.

It is the William Holden show as this gives him an early chance to stretch beyond the limited roles that he had been given up to this point. Billy Wilder would tap into the swirling torrents of darkness, cynicism, and pain lurking underneath his sexy exterior in Sunset Boulevard shortly, but The Dark Past is an early glimpse of his depths as an actor. He perhaps overdoes some of the contortions and fractured psychological torture, but his promise is all right there just waiting to be nurtured and given even greater chance.