Recensioni de* critic*

I revisited John Huston's tremendous 1946 film about psychologically traumatized veterans, Let There Be Light, a major visual and narrative influence on Paul Thomas Anderson's The Master. The early round of interviews between military psychologists and veterans (some of which are quoted in The Master's dialogue) is really something to see. The static shot-reverse-shot camerawork of these scenes... has a penetrating simplicity.

This is a vital study of the cost of war beyond body counts, but it's equally revealing for showing the first mass adoption of psychotherapy, with all the pitfalls that entails.

It's a sympathetic and moving chronicle of postwar GI psychiatric patients, all suffering from battle-related "nervous" disorders. Huston lets the fragile state of these men serve as an implicit denunciation of the cost of war even as he celebrates their resilience and recovery.

It is a moving work, its hopeful conclusion overshadowed by powerful interviews with soldiers about to undergo treatment.