- Based on a play by James Warwick that had already been made into a movie less than ten years earlier, Rudolph Maté's The Dark Past is a fairly average hostage drama most notable for its extensive discussions of psychoanalysis and creative dream sequences. As related through a largely unnecessary flashback, escaped criminal Al Walker (William Holden) and his cronies (Nina Foch, Berry Kroeger, and Robert Osterloh) decide to hide out at a cabin belonging to psychology professor Dr. Collins (Lee J. Cobb). Collins and his family (Lois Maxwell, Robert Hyatt) are hosting a group of friends (Adele Jergens, Stephen Dunne, Steven Geray, Wilton Graff) that weekend, but Walker hopes that a crowded cabin will make for a better hideout than an empty shack. Most of the film consists of Dr. Collins wielding his psychological know-how to help Walker and everyone else make it out of this situation alive.
- Although The Dark Past pales in comparison to its more famous thematic cousins The Petrified Forest and Key Largo, it does demonstrate some originality in its dream sequences. In the first dream, which features inverted colors that look like a photographic negative, an umbrella fails to keep out the rain and Walker finds himself surrounded by prison bars. In the second sequence, we discover in an intentionally disorienting point-of-view shot that the dripping liquid isn't rain and those vertical lines aren't bars. While it is fun to see Holden and Cobb cast against type -- Holden was almost always the hero, and Cobb was never bookish -- the rest of the film is a relatively paint-by-numbers drama that isn't quite memorable enough as either a hostage drama or a psychology piece to merit a bright future.
