David and Lisa (1962)
(Frank Perry, US 1962, 92 min., 16mm)
After Bedlam. Six years before facing off against the insane computer HAL in 2001, Keir Dullea launched his career battling demons of a very different sort. David (Dullea), a brilliant, neurotic teenager with a morbid fear of being touched, is sent by his suffocating mother to a school for troubled youth. There, David meets Lisa (Janet Margolin), a childlike young woman who speaks in rhyme to keep her own demons at bay. Interestingly, director Frank Perry presents the school as anything but a snake pit: the psychiatric staff is caring and treatment progressive; it’s the cruel world outside that’s the problem. Less angry than Rebel Without a Cause and without the cloying sentimentality of Splendor in the Grass, the film presents David and Lisa as creative outsiders who must be understood before they can be “cured,” a term this sensitive, compassionate film is careful to avoid.