Pressure Point (film)
| Pressure Point | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Directed by | Hubert Cornfield |
| Produced by | Stanley Kramer |
| Screenplay by | Hubert Cornfield S. Lee Pogostin |
| Based on |
Destiny's Tot 1955 short story by Robert Mitchell Lindner |
| Starring |
Sidney Poitier Bobby Darin |
| Music by | Ernest Gold |
| Cinematography | Ernest Haller |
| Edited by | Frederic Knudtson |
|
Production
company |
Larcas Productions
|
| Distributed by | United Artists |
|
Release date
|
|
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Running time
|
91 minutes |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Budget | less than $1 million |
| Box office | $665,000 |
Pressure Point is a 1962 psychological drama film about a prison psychiatrist who is called upon to treat a Nazi sympathizer during World War II. It stars Sidney Poitier and Bobby Darin. The film was based on the short story "Destiny's Tot" by Robert Lindner.
Poitier plays the unnamed chief psychiatrist at an institution in 1962. A doctor on his staff is frustrated with his patient and wants him assigned to another doctor. The psychiatrist then tells of having a similar experience 20 years earlier with a Nazi sympathizer. A flashback begins.
In the flashback, a new prisoner arrives and is assigned to the psychiatrist. The doctor soon discovers the prisoner was arrested for sedition by joining the German American Bund and calling for overthrow of the American government. he prisoner discusses sociopathic behaviors throughout his life with the psychiatrist, each being shown as a flashback first to his childhood where he had an abusive alcoholic father and mother with dependency issues, second to his early adulthood where he leads a gang of young adults terrorizing various locations and then to recently in the prisoner's life where he had joined the Nazi party. Throughout the inmate's life, he has displayed a lack of emotion for those around them and works to obtain only pleasure for himself through disruptive acts displaying the traits of Antisocial Personality Disorder.
Throughout the series of flashbacks, the doctor begins to understand that the inmate is a danger to society at large and that, if released, would go about using his superficial wits and charms for his own ends. The doctor risks his reputation to have the inmate contained because outside of his office the inmate has a reputation as a model prisoner. The psychiatric staff decide to release the prisoner against his recommendation, believing he is biased against the inmate due to his belief in Nazism. This ends the flashback. When the other doctor asked what happened to the inmate, it is revealed that he later beat a man to death for no reason.
The prisoner displays sociopathic behavior, often manipulating people with no regard to consequence but furthermore he talks at lengths of the nature of humanity and how psychotic people take advantage of other people's needs. The ideas of race come up, as the inmate taunts him about his views on Nazism, he talks at length of how people use race and religion as scapegoats to control the minds of people with nothing else to take their frustrations out.
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