Pressure Point (film)

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Pressure Point
Pressure Point FilmPoster.jpeg
Directed by Hubert Cornfield
Produced by Stanley Kramer
Written by Robert Lindner (story)
Hubert Cornfield
S. Lee Pogostin
Starring Sidney Poitier
Bobby Darin
Distributed by United Artists
Release dates
  • December 2, 1962 (1962-12-02)
Running time 91 minutes
Country United States
Language English
Budget less than $1 million[1]
Box office $665,000[1]

Pressure Point is a 1962 drama film about a prison psychiatrist who is called upon to treat a Nazi sympathizer during World War II. It stars Sidney Poitier and Bobby Darin. The film was based on the short story "Destiny's Tot" by Robert Lindner.


Poitier plays the unnamed chief psychiatrist at an institution in 1962. A doctor on his staff is frustrated with his patient and wants him assigned to another doctor. The psychiatrist then tells of having a similar experience 20 years earlier with a Nazi sympathizer. A flashback begins.

In the flashback, a new prisoner arrives and is assigned to the psychiatrist. The doctor soon discovers the prisoner was arrested for sedition by joining the German American Bund and calling for overthrow of the American government. The prisoner discusses sociopathic behaviors throughout his life with the psychiatrist, each being shown as a flashback first to his childhood where he had an abusive alcoholic father and mother with dependency issues, second to his early adulthood where he leads a gang of young adults terrorizing various locations and then to recently in the prisoner's life where he had joined the Nazi party. Throughout the inmate's life, he has displayed a lack of emotion for those around them and works to obtain only pleasure for himself through disruptive acts displaying the traits of Antisocial Personality Disorder.

Throughout the series of flashbacks, the doctor begins to understand that the inmate is a danger to society at large and that, if released, would go about using his superficial wits and charms for his own ends. The doctor risks his reputation to have the inmate contained because outside of his office the inmate has a reputation as a model prisoner. The psychiatric staff decide to release the prisoner against his recommendation, believing he is biased against the inmate due to his belief in Nazism. This ends the flashback. When the other doctor what happened the inmate, it is revealed that he later beat a man to death for no reason.


The prisoner displays sociopathic behavior, often manipulating people with no regard to consequence but furthermore he talks at lengths of the nature of humanity and how psychotic people take advantage of the needs of people. The ideas of race come up, as the inmate taunts him about his views on Nazism, he talks at length of how people use race and religion as scapegoats to control the minds of people with nothing else to take their frustrations out.

The interactions between Poitier and the inmate draw to the tensions of race relations in the 1960s, when the film was originally released.

The film delves deep into the mind of the inmate through psychoanalysis performed by Poitier. Psychiatry plays a large role in the film and is displayed as a positive force for the understanding of the minds of man.

Poitier himself said the work was "a box-office piece," and the film played on many themes already present in film at the time.[2]



The film recorded a loss of $991,000.[1]


  1. ^ a b c Tino Balio, United Artists: The Company The Changed the Film Industry, Uni of Wisconsin Press, 1987 p 145
  2. ^ Slane, Andrea (2000). "Pressure Points: Political Psychology, Screen Adaptation, and the Management of Racism in the Case-History Genre". Camera Obscura 15 (45): 70–113. 

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