The Treasure of the Madre

When Sigmund Freud saw his first movie--on a trip to New York in September 1909--he was "quietly amused" by what Biographer Ernest Jones describes as "one of the primitive films of those days with plenty of wild chasing." Odds are that he would scarcely be amused by a film now in the script stage and headed for the cameras next year, when an independent group led by Director John Huston (The Treasure of the Sierra Madre) and Producer Wolfgang Reinhardt (son of Max) go to Vienna to make a movie about Sigmund Freud.

Huston and Reinhardt first commissioned French Philosopher-Playwright Jean Paul Sartre to do the script. Sartre responded with a 450-page outline (many times the usual length of a first-draft film treatment), and Huston sent it back with gentle suggestions for cutting. From Paris came a second version, 870 pages long, and a third, running to 1,000. Huston quietly set them aside. One trouble was that the script suffered from Sartre's galloping Marxism and deep-seated anti-Freudianism. Said Sartre last week: "Je m'en fiche" (meaning, more or less. "I don't give a damn").

Not Dirty. With Hollywood Writer Charles Kaufman, Huston and Reinhardt proceeded, meeting earlier this year in Huston's castle in Ireland. Although their approach from the beginning has been as serious as a neurosurgical autopsy--"I was not a Freudian when we started this," says Reinhardt, "but after a time, when the Oedipus complex was mentioned all joking ceased"--the three men's discussions frequently embarrassed and sometimes outraged Huston's pious Irish Catholic servants.

Nonetheless, "there is no cheap vulgarization," Kaufman insists. "It is a story of a man against his own puritanical prejudices. But if God himself made this picture it would infuriate Catholics, Baptists, Freudians, neo-Freudians, Jungians, Adlerians and so on." Says Reinhardt: "It will not be a dirty picture. We aren't so much afraid of the Legion of Decency as we are of the American Legion and its cult of the mother."

Casting Problem. The film will deal with only ten years of Freud's life, the early era of professional discovery, and center on three main characters: Freud; his teacher, Dr. Josef Breuer; and an attractive young patient called Cecilie, a part drawn from the histories of several early Freud patients but mainly from the famed Anna O., a patient of Breuer's in whose case Freud became interested. She liked to talk about her symptoms because somehow that relieved her. Anna O. described the process as "chimney sweeping"; for Freud it was the foundation of the concept of psychological catharsis.

In the plot now planned, Dr. Breuer first analyzes Cecilie and she falls in love with him. Breuer meets that little transference with an enthusiastic countertransference--until Mrs. Breuer finds out about it. Freud takes over, solves the dilemma and resolves the case.* This leads him into the marathon of self-probing--mainly into the causes of his antagonism toward his father and his deep love for his mother--that he eventually generalized as the Oedipus complex.

After the script, the most urgent problem is casting. Marilyn Monroe has expressed interest in the part of Cecilie, and there are fond hopes of acquiring Marlon Brando for the part of Sigmund Freud. Brando, after all, made his stage debut in I Remember Mama.

* The real Mrs. Breuer was indeed very jealous of Anna O., causing her husband to give up the case. Anna O., writes Freud's Biographer Ernest Jones, thereupon entered "the throes of an hysterical childbirth, the logical termination of a phantom pregnancy that had been invisibly developing in response to Breuer's ministrations." But no one succeeded in freeing her from the basic source of her trouble--the fact that her beloved father had died of a heart attack in a Neapolitan brothel.

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