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Hollywood comes calling for Sartre

JA July 27

First published in the Newsreel section of Meanjin Vol 69:2

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In 1958, Hollywood director John Huston decided that his next project would be a film about renowned psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud and that Jean-Paul Sartre, being a fellow European intellectual himself, was just the man to write it. Sartre was perhaps not the most obvious choice given the differences between his theories on existentialism and Freud’s thoughts on the power of the subconscious, yet having already worked together on the Broadway season of No Exit, Huston was adamant. Sartre, in turn, did not have it in him to sniff at the $25 000 fee offered for his services.

The two eventually came together at Huston’s property in the Irish countryside near Galway in September 1959. However what began as a promising partnership soon descended into a bitter falling out that would border on farcical. Huston, according to an article in the Irish Times, had it in mind to create ‘a kind of intellectual detective story, following the hero down the back alleys of the unconscious to his theory of psychosexual development⎯a descent into the subconscious somewhat like Dante’s into hell’. Sartre’s script, on the other hand, was a densely woven five-hour epic on Freud and the formation of his theory on the sexual etiology of hysterical neurosis, told through his treatment of a young patient named Anna O.

Sartre’s early letters to his partner, Simone de Beauvoir, hint at these creative differences. The philosopher wrote that he often saw Huston ‘tearing by the house at a canter wearing a cap’ with a donkey running along behind him, a sight which made ‘a farce of the whole thing’. He found the house, which Huston had stocked with typical Hollywood extravagance, and its Irish countryside equally unappealing. ‘[O]nly the presence of grass proves that an atom bomb wasn’t dropped there,’ Sartre wrote of his surroundings, ‘one step away from lunar, precisely the interior landscape of my boss, the great Huston’. His later correspondence was far more explicit as the two found themselves at odds over revisions to the script. Sartre derided Huston’s ‘infantile vanity’ over his collection of red tuxedos and his intellectual emptiness, which left him ‘literally incapable of speaking to those whom he has invited’.

Huston shot back in his autobiography that the philosopher would only talk in long, fast-paced monologues throughout their work, leaving everyone around him with ‘a glazed look’. Huston added that he would sometimes ‘leave the room in desperation’ but when he returned, Sartre wouldn’t even have noticed his absence. The final sting surely accompanies this description of Sartre as a ‘little barrel of a man … as ugly as a human being can be. His face was bloated and pitted, his teeth were yellowed and he was wall-eyed’.

Miraculously, Sartre did eventually agree to rewrite the script, however perhaps he only intended this as a final barb. The redraft came back even longer than the first, with Sartre claiming that he saw ‘no reason why the film shouldn’t be eight hours long’. Huston and his colleagues spent a further six months honing the script down to three hours, upon which Sartre furiously pulled out of the picture and refused to even have his name appear in the credits.

In the end, Huston did manage to get his dark, suspenseful thriller off the ground. Montgomery Clift was cast as Freud, however his memory was so damaged from alcohol and drugs that Huston was forced to write out his lines on labels and hide them within the set. The film was released in 1962, with the sensational yet strangely apt title, Freud: The Secret Passion.


 

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