The Dark Past (1948)

An odd little noir flick. William Holden plays an escaped mobster who, along with gal (played by Nina Foch) and two of his henchmen, takes refuge in a cabin owned by a professor of psychiatry (played by Lee J. Cobb), who is there with his wife, their son, and a couple of friends of theirs.

While Holden waits for the guy who is supposed to pick them up with a boat, Cobb tries to tease out what problems are eating at this guy. Holden alternates between scoffing at psychiatry and asking for help, but offers answers to questions only grudgingly. Still, Cobb is able to break through sufficiently that when the cops finally catch on, things end quietly. It's far too neat and tidy, but the story is related by Cobb to a police officer, who earlier scoffed at Cobb's insistence he could help a young man who had been in juvenile court 9 times. So there's a decent argument that Cobb is making it sound like smoother sailing than it was to convince this cop that some criminals are just people with deeper issues that can be resolved with compassion and patience. 

As my dad noted, that's not a philosophy that seems to have won out here in the U.S., sadly. Also, I did not realize that the police would parade recently arrested people in front of their officers, so the cops could become accustomed to what they looked like. You know, for future reference. Because there will be crimes in the future, and it will just save time to go immediately after people who were arrested in the past.

90% of the movie takes place in the cabin, with occasional cuts to what the cops are up to with their checkpoints. There are also some flashbacks to Holden's childhood, plus an interesting dream sequence where it looks like they overexposed the film, or used a negative.

I think Holden's performance is a little too much. He seems to be a boss or leader of some sorts, but he's so high-strung and ready to kill anybody that it's hard to picture him running the show. Holden's character seems more like the trigger man for a big mob boss. The one the boss threatens to unleash on the hero if they don't talk. It's like working for the Joker, if he wasn't also brilliant, and just wildly homicidal.

Maybe that's because Foch's character is supposed to be the boss. She's mostly calm and level-headed, speaks much more eloquently than the typical gangster's moll in one of these films. She carries her own gun, she gives orders, she brushes off threats from Cobb's guests and staff with an amused smirk. She only loses her cool when she feels like Holden is slipping through her grasp, as he listens more and more to Cobb.