Blind Alley is a curiosity from the 1930s but still kind of fun to watch, esp for the dream sequences

 Charles Vidor's 1939 film, Blind Alley, is today more of a curiosity thank a great film - I was led to it because the Criterion Channel promoted it as part of its look at cinema and psychology - but that said it's a kick to watch and the film is only about 70 minutes long: Imagine that! The film is adapted from a stage play and it looks it, though I have to say the play was probably pretty good, in the Agatha Christie mold, perhaps. Basic plot? We begin with a professor leading a college (all male, all white) class on psychology; he just begins to discuss abnormal behavior and the fundamentals of Freudian psy - not nearly as well known then as today - when the bell rings, class dismissed. As it happens, that very night!, when the prof goes home to a house full of weekend guests and his young son, a convicted "killer" breaks out of jail, holding the warden hostage (it makes no sense that they kill the warden, btw), and they are looking for a hangout and head for the prof''s house, where they hold the whole household hostage while awaiting a boat pickup for a getaway. The plot turns own the prof's ability to "analyze" the killer and unbury the childhood memories that have tormented him for his whole life and have make him the killer that he is. The premise is intriguing, and the development of the plot, while far from probable and a complete distortion of the process of analysis, but who really cares? It's kind of fun, intense at times, and it features a few highly imaginative dream sequences that probably inspired later such passages in Hitchcock and others.