Fri 25 Sep 2009
A Movie Review by Walter Albert: THE CRIME OF THE CENTURY (1933).
Posted by Steve under Mystery movies , Reviews1 Comment
THE CRIME OF THE CENTURY. Paramount, 1933; Jean Hersholt, Wynne Gibson, Stuart Erwin, Frances Dee, Gordon Westcott, Robert Elliott, David Landau, William Janney. Screenplay adapted by Florence Ryerson from the play The Grootman Case by Walter Maria Espe Director: William Beaudine. Shown at Cinevent 41, Columbus OH, May 2009.
Jean Hersholt, a well-known “alienist,” comes to the police to beg them to arrest him. If they don’t, he is going to kill a man, one of his patients who works for a bank and whom he’s ordered while under hypnosis to bring him 100,000 dollars.
(This would appear to contradict what I have always understood about hypnosis, which is that subjects won’t obey orders that are against their basic nature. But I suppose that the doctor knows his patient better than I do.)
The cast of characters consists of an adulterous wife, a nosy reporter, two very incidental servants, a missing son, and the wife’s lover who seems to be almost everybody’s choice for the killer.
This is not one of those legendary Paramount pictures that turn out to be long unseen gems, but a stagey, hokey melodrama that not even some good actors can save. Not a bomb, but a bottom-of-the-bill filler.
September 25th, 2009 at 8:58 pm
Not that anyone concerned with this bothered with reality, but hypnosis has been controversial since the days of Franz Mesmer, and it’s use as a theraputic tool called into question and even its existence debated.
Memories recalled under hypnosis are no longer considered dependable by most courts, and though police use hypnotic memory on witnesses it is very circumscribed.
Supposedly you can’t be made to go against your nature under hypnosis, but some suggest that you could be told that poison was a vitamin, or a banana a gun, or some such nonsense and thus commit a crime unknowingly. Others argue that there is no hypnotic state and the individual simply goes along with the wishes of the hypnotist, more a surrender of will (within limits) than a heightened suggestive state.
Hypnosis has both been useful as a tool in helping people, and abused as a gimmick. Memories have been ‘planted’ by therapists and false memories encouraged. Right now there is no more a consensus than there was when Mesmer first practiced it.
But it doesn’t work the way it did in the movies — that much is certain.