Pressure Point

Pressure Point is a 1962 American psychological drama film directed and co-written by Hubert Cornfield. It stars Sidney Poitier and Bobby Darin, about a prison psychiatrist treating an American Nazi sympathizer during World War II. Plot The film begins at a psychiatric institution in 1962. A young doctor (Peter Falk) on a staff headed by a senior psychiatrist (Sidney Poitier) is frustrated with his patient, who is black and detests him because he is white. The doctor has been trying for a breakthrough for 7 1/2 months and feels he cannot go on; he demands that his patient be assigned to another psychiatrist. The senior psychiatrist, who is black, then tells of having an experience 20 years earlier in 1942 with a Nazi sympathizer at a federal penitentiary where he then worked as a psychiatrist. In a flashback, a new prisoner (Bobby Darin) arrives and is assigned to the doctor. The doctor soon discovers the prisoner is racist, and was arrested for sedition due to his Nazi sympathies. The patient taunts the doctor, who responds, "I'd like to kill you, but I want to help you." The prisoner has a sleep disorder and blackouts and, over time, is prodded to discuss trauma he experienced throughout his life, particularly in childhood at the hands of his father and through the weakness of his mother. These events are shown as flashbacks. The prisoner describes how, while impoverished during the Great Depression, he met an attractive young woman who was kind to him and seemed interested in a relationship, but her father puts a stop to the budding romance. The prisoner saw that the family was Jewish, and this - clearly in tandem with his other serious personality problems - leads him to Nazism.