OVP: The Mark (1961)

Film: The Mark (1961)

Stars: Stuart Whitman, Rod Steiger, Maria Schell, Brenda de Banzie

Director: Guy Green

Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Actor-Stuart Whitman)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Film, even period movies or fantasy pictures, is always a reflection of the era that it came from.  Production styles, specific actors, technological limitations...all of these things make up a movie & its inner-world.  But "issue films" are obviously more reflective not just of their time, but also of Hollywood attempting to understand a specific issue.  This occasionally creates really magical cinema.  A picture like Intruder in the Dust, for example, takes a pointed look at racism & how it can infect our minds for reasons we don't really understand.  And then there's a film like The Mark, whose handling of a taboo subject instead wanders into dicey sexual politics that make you look at it from a modern lens with skeptical eyes.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is about Jim (Whitman), a man who has recently been released from prison after essentially abducting a young girl with intent to rape her.  He spends much of the film trying to reintegrate into society, partially through the help of his therapist Dr. McNally (Steiger), and part of this goes well.  He gets a decent job, and even starts romancing a woman named Ruth (Schell), but after a different child is abducted and Jim is questioned by the police (Jim is innocent & has an alibi), a tabloid reporter exposes Jim's previous conviction, upending his life with Ruth (who has a young daughter) and causing him to lose his job.  The film ends with Jim & Ruth essentially trying to work things out, though Ruth is still unsure how she will handle the situation of trusting Jim with her daughter, also a key figure in her life.

The film tries to tackle its subject head-on, focusing more on our perceptions on rehabilitation, and if we think a criminal can be rehabilitated.  However, since Jim is essentially convicted of attempting the worst crime imaginable, it tests even the most ardent of believers in reform in assuming that he can get better.  It's difficult to watch the film mostly because it over-simplifies Jim's crime (and the psychological aspects of it) by assuming that Jim is essentially just an ordinary guy who made a mistake, but it's not like he stood up a bank or something (his crime would require a more serious psychological disturbance), and the film doesn't really handle that well.  The movie doesn't feel prepared in the early 1960's to tackle the reality of the heinousness of Jim's crime, and as a result it feels disjointed, trying to drown the viewer in psychobabble rather than admit that Jim's reform is unlikely (and even if it's possible, it's not worth the risk to Ruth's daughter to have him be a part of her life during that reform).

Whitman won an Oscar nomination for The Mark, the only one of his career, for his work as Jim, but while I understand why, it's not earned.  Whitman's performance is very stoic, almost monolithic, in trying to make Jim seem like as ordinary of a man as possible (though a man tortured by his past).  Nominating an actor for playing a disturbed person & playing them as seriously and sympathetically as possible isn't new (this is something the Academy regularly awards), but it doesn't make the acting good.  There's little nuance and no personality in the work that Whitman is doing, and as a result his Jim remains a two-dimensional character in a film that desperately wants him to be more fully-fleshed.  Whitman's performance is, in fact, part of the reason The Mark can't lift off-so afraid the film is of giving Whitman more complexity that it sort of just exists.