The Age of Commercialism

Surprisingly incoherent and boring

A brilliant film that helped define a genre

It’s sentimental, ridiculously long and only occasionally funny

In this genteel picture of mental illness, Kier Dullea is David, sent to a kind of boarding school for disturbed young adults. The dozen or so other students, or patients, are a diverse lot. Some seem pretty much like everyone else. But Lisa, Janet Margolin, is clearly schizophrenic. David may be obsessively neat and won't let anyone touch him, but that's peanuts compared to Lisa's looping around like a hebephrenic and speaking in clumsy, repetitive rhymes. After many tribulations, the two seem to cure one another. At the climax, Dullea extends his hand to the stressed-out Margolin and she speaks warmly to him in plain English.Of course everyone enjoys a happy ending and this film gives it to the viewer. The head shrink, Howard Da Silva, plays practically no part in the remission of their symptoms. He makes a few remarks and is accommodating and that's about it.A couple of observations. The gradual improvement of both David and Lisa is rather nicely handled. Gradually, David loses his supercilious quality, his superiority to everything around him. It's not just in the dialog either, but In the way Dullea handles it. He becomes less cross, more thoughtful. He develops a vision of a future that isn't governed by inhuman mechanical forces. He starts thinking about medical school rather than electronic clocks set to perfect time by radio (which we have today).And Lisa's unhurried change from a sloppy child/woman into something resembling an adult is reasonably well done too -- not so much through the character's behavior but through symbols of internal life like clothing and grooming. When we first see Margolin, she's a slob. She's in a high-waisted dress with a tangled mop of hair, playing hop scotch on the schools floor tiles and raving to herself. By the end, she's in neat, bright clothing and her hair is tidy.In fact, she's stunningly beautiful, with her large wet calf eyes and her flawless features. Her idoneous presence carries with it a reigning melancholy, due, I think, to the configuration of her eyebrows. She can't help looking a little distressed all the time. Her acting talent was modest but she was extremely appealing into middle age, or as far into middle age as fate took her. A shame.I can't tell whether Keir Dullea is handsome or not but he's certainly as clean cut as the role calls for, and he uses his clipped, authoritarian voice to good effect.It's not a very realistic story. This is some expensive boarding school we're talking about. I have no idea how that Hispanic psychopath got in there. The only thing wrong with him is that he's too horny. Somebody with Margolin's disorder is far more likely to wind up in a state hospital where nobody can play the piano because there is no piano, nor are there paintings on the walls or "A Day In Paris" celebrations. Schizophrenia is a terrible illness. The entire family feels struck by lightning, and the patient doesn't wear make up like Margolin. And she doesn't get "cured" by falling in love with another patient, though she may remit spontaneously.We don't know Margolin's back story but we know something of Dullea's. He's stuck in the same familiar trap as James Dean in "Rebel Without A Cause" -- weak father, domineering mother. In case you missed it, Neva Patterson is cast as the hoity-toity mother. She's the CRP official in "All The President's Men" who refuses to be interviewed by Woodward and Bernstein, tells them they don't know the meaning of the word "loyalty", and closes the door in their faces. She chills the air of every room she enters.But not to put the film down too much. It tackles a serious subject in a mature way. And although there are many goofs, none of them is serious enough to sap the film of its virtues. All stories of mental illness should end so satisfactorily.

Poor Mrs. Clemens! One more castrating mom to add to our culture's most wanted list. She's wanted for turning her son, David, into an "obsessive-compulsive." By depriving him of love, pushing him towards success and achievement; by being more dominant than her milk toast husband; by being sexy but asexual, beautiful but cold, she must suffer the hostility of not only her son, but to a lesser extent, her husband, and her son's doctors--add too her son's fellow "inmate," a sex-crazed teenager, who has "knocked up 13 girls," and whose mom is a hooker.Anyway, David is deathly afraid of time and death, and he associates these with his upper class mother. Because she is unfeeling, non-communicative, and non-protective, touch itself can kill him. If he is emotionless, it's because his mother is. If he is totally shut off to the world, than his perfectionist mom's to blame. If he cannot develop, it is, in Freudian fashion, because his mother lords it over his father, thus making David mom-dependent, and his father, David's way into the larger world, "nothing but a marshmallow." So it is that Mrs. Clemens is both ice and earth, remote and engulfing, unloving and clinging--to the boy she gave birth to. It's mother-time and mother-love which make touch terrorizing to David. And his outright expressed hatred of her is viewed by him as a step to healing: "parents don't like you when you're sick, and when your well, either." Mrs. Clemens, simply put, is too much mother, who mothers too little.The true mother is the woman holding her son in the railway station, on the night that David escapes his toxic parents' home. This mother's love is unconditional, sensual, and giving and David claims her as his very own mother. With her as a mom he might in Dr. Swinford's words "take a chance and open up and let love in." Interesting how a scene of blissful maternity can jump start David's recovery.Lisa, his "patient" and dear female friend is also a prop to his wellness. Lisa, unlike David, has no history, no mother to blame for her multiple personalities. She is free-floating, adorable, innocent, child-like (several years younger than David) and earthy in her dark features. She's capable of a kind of psychic communication, rhyme-speech, and expressed intimacy. She is, in other words, a blessing to David. She's a "pearl of a girl," in his words--words that awaken sensual awareness in both--because she is spontaneous and vulnerable and serves as David's inner self or soul. One of her telling rhymes is "rhymes, time, slime" which seems to point to David's second birth, and to herself as one of its mediators.Dr. Swinford or "Alan" to his "students" or "inmates" is another of David's safe mediators. He fathers David's development through a kind of liberal, humanistic, "do your own thing" approach. Any constraint is suspect, and creativity is the ultimate form of therapy at his private institution. He is satisfactory to David despite the fact that he passively absorbs more hostility from him than does his hapless father from his mother. His non-judgmental guidance, in a sense, seems to make him a third female kind of figure in David's recovery, but Dr Swinford, in his professional capacity---he's a psychiatrist and a more convincing father figure whose role and profession he will follow--also serves as model for David's autonomy.That autonomy or rebirth is equivalent to recovery or David's integration into love, authority, and society. This means, above all else, a transcendence of his mother and his worldly birth. But doesn't his rejection of his mother include his rejection of "rhyme, time, slime?" So how will he accept the world without accepting time? Perhaps because he's discovered male time--and male identity (his terror of freak shows and the Geroge/Georgina character). This newly discovered order is controlled, ordered, authorized-- the very stuff that he has abhorred and ridiculed to date, but which now can be viewed differently from a select identity. He has entered Freud's history (the clock is fixed) and left his mother's behind.The towering museum columns between which the final scene is shot is proof of his elevation into manhood. The tall blond young man walks off into the morning Light (why did it take him all night to reach the museum?) having dispelled the darkness, hand and hand with his little brown-eyed girl. Isn't it ironic that in the mutual rescue scene at the museum that it is David who allows Lisa to grasp his hand when--his rejection of her in the piano room is why she escaped and is endangered--she should be allowing him to touch her.

"The Miarcle Worker", "To Kill a Mockingbird" and "David and Lisa", arrived in theaters in the same season and all black and white, all intense, human stories...that influenced me to dedicate my life to becoming a "wounded Healer". This little film, hit me hard, by first confronting my own demons, my family of origin, the dry 1950's in the Mid West Kansas prairie. Not like the "Snake Pit", this exploration of mental illness, was warmer, more understandable and approachable with the human heart. Meinger's Clinic was nearby in Topeka, Kansas, and they were doing the best clinical work in the world to date.The movie theater was our only source of connection with the outside world emotionally. Yes, radio and later TV, just one channel CBS, brought to our living rooms, words, pictures and ideas, some painful some joyous.A small Kansas wheat farming community can be a "closed information system", that is thrown into conflict, by new ideas about humanity, God, the larger World out there.We were "shaped" emotionally more by film than TV or Radio. Cinema Scope presented a window on the world, in sound and images 60x our physical being and we were enmeshed on many psychological levels by film. That is the power of film, especially in a theater with other people.James Dean, Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson, in "Giant", Kim Novak and William Holden, in "Picnic", made down the road from our town, were only the tip of the iceberg. "Best Years of Our Lives" and "Since You Went Away", were more than just images on the silver screen in a dark movie theater....that was 'US' up there, that was our story, our lives. We were "known, validated perhaps" by these images.We were "defined" by fashion, haircuts, musicals, songs, dance, social conflict and reminded us of our humanity, the HUMAN COMEDY, that we lived in our local patterns, in our own words and behaviors.I later became a "theater major" at the University of Colorado. Theater helped me understand human behavior, human motivation and the human masks of tragedy and comedy. Sports were important for character and physical glory and the Olympics, But Theater showed "why" the hero, the villain, the plots enriched our daily emotions.Psychology was a dimension of theater. "David and Lisa", I was like them "both" in my way and was led to explore my own shadow and my teenage demons. Like "Rebel Without a Cause" we found these films to be therapeutic and healing on many levels. Walt Disney had lied to us and westerns no longer held my interests. As a teenager my hormones were creating a new me, a new sense of personality and the purpose of being alive. I had to "know" who I am and who I am not...for some reason. "Why are we here on the dirt prairie?" No, not "Oklahoma" again? haI never take a client that is "sicker" than I am. ha And felt I should drop out my first year in graduate school, because I saw myself on every page. "I feel I am too sick to be a therapist", I told my professors. They smiled."We are more concerned about students, who never see themselves on any of the pages in the DSM", they added.I have not regretted becoming a therapist and "David and Lisa" helped build the bridge to that island, called the "Unconscious".The cast is perfect. The performances are influenced by the 1950s and like ...'Without a Cause', parents were that emotionally dead to us even then.I am pleased this film has survived and is on DVD. Music is lovely and fits the action, Kier should have been nominated for an Oscar as well as the actor who played "Lisa" can't remember her name. I actually become a close version of the psychiatrist in my way. VSS

Although I viewed this film over 40 years ago, it still comes back to my mind from time to time. It packs an emotional punch that is rarely seen in cinema today. The young Keir Dullea gives a very convincing performance as a highly intelligent, but mentally disturbed young man. The cinematography is excellent, burning images into the mind that are still there 40 years later. I recommend this film highly to anyone interested in the cinematic art, as well as those who enjoy a strong story. The fact that the film was shot in black and white is a definite plus. It tends to accentuate the starkness of David's world and subliminally takes the viewer into a world of absolutes, where shades of gray have no place.