Compulsion & Salvation

The Mark (Continental). Pale from jail, a young Canadian accountant takes a job in a small city in the British Midlands. What was his crime? The movie makers let the moviegoer wonder, and while he wonders they invite him to like the young man. He is serious, decent, good at his job, but obviously afraid of something--something in himself? He reports to his parole officer, the psychiatrist (Rod Steiger) who treated him for three years in prison. As they talk, the past cracks open like a troubled tomb and horribly yields up its specters.

A forceless father, a smothering mother, an adolescence strangled with apron strings. Fears of women, fumbles at sex. A slow, sick drift of disappointed desire that bears him insidiously back to the dear, safe days when he was a pretty little boy among pretty little girls who adored him and made no demands. But now he is no longer a little boy, and when he tries to behave like one, the games get stranger and stranger, till one day he finds himself alone in the woods with a ten-year-old girl, breathing hard and gliding close to the terrified child. Before anything worse can happen she starts to cry. He stares, staggers, vomits. At the trial, he declares his guilt and makes no defense. In prison, he comes to understand his compulsions. But now, as he struggles to rebuild his life, he wonders dreadfully if the stress of daily life might not drive him to do the same terrible thing again. "You can't be sure," the psychiatrist bleakly informs him. "Everybody has these impulses. But healthy people learn to live with them and control them. I think you're healthy."

Encouraged, the accountant takes a giant step: he asks a young widow (Maria Schell) to go out with him. They get along just fine. She asks him to dinner at her house. When he arrives, the door is opened by her ten-year-old daughter. To his surprise and relief, the hero feels like a father to the girl, and he soon begins to feel like a husband to her mother. Then a scandal scribbler reveals his past. He loses his job, the woman he loves, his will to live. "I can't go on!" he sobs to his doctor, who calmly replies: "You can try." As the picture ends, he is trying, and the widow is beginning to try, too.

To make a serious movie about salvation is doubtless admirable; but to pick perversion as the hero's sin is surely to invite suspicions of sensationalism and feelings of repugnance. Yet if the men who made The Mark had any sensational intentions, they are not to be seen on the screen. The film's attitude is calm, objective, sympathetic to the criminal--though not to his crime. Actress Schell and Actor Steiger give restrained and intelligent performances; Actor Stuart Whitman, known heretofore as just a passing ripple on Hollywood's Muscle Beach, is perspicaciously cast as the Cain-marked protagonist; and Director Guy (The Angry Silence) Green unerringly walks a tightrope of good taste across the snake pit.

Scenarists Sidney Buchman and Stanley Mann, deftly dodging every clinical cliche, negotiate a warren of psychiatric explications with grace and clarity. To date, theirs is undoubtedly the year's most skillful script; but it shows more than skill. It unlids that black hole of unbeing into which any man might at some time fall. It drops the spectator suddenly through the floor of everyday reality and leaves him for some shuddering moments in the depths from which Dostoevsky cried to heaven: "Man, man! One cannot live quite without pity."

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