Plot

A Black prison psychiatrist is assigned the distasteful task of helping a paranoid American Nazi charged with sedition.

An African-American prison psychiatrist (Sidney Poitier) finds the boundaries of his professionalism sorely tested when he must counsel a disturbed inmate (Bobby Darin) with bigoted Nazi tendencies.—Anonymous

During the turbulent Civil Rights era of the early 1960s, a young white psychiatrist becomes discouraged with his inability to reach a disaffected, institutionalized young Black man. The supervising psychiatrist, who is also Black, encourages his subordinate by relating his own experiences of 20 years earlier when he was a prison psychiatrist assigned to the distasteful task of treating a viciously paranoid race-baiting Nazi charged with sedition.—duke1029@aol.com

When a young psychiatrist comes to his Afro-American chief to tell that he cannot bear a 13-year-old patient, the doctor discloses a similar experience he had when he was a rookie working as a prison psychiatrist. In 1942, the doctor is assigned to give psychiatric treatment and evaluate the dangerous American Nazi patient accused of sedition. The racist patient has nightmares and insomnia and the doctor analyzes him along 18 months, finding the reason of his disturbance. The patient convinces the Board of Direction that he deserves to be on probation, but the doctor is reluctant and diagnoses that the patient has only resolved his sleeping problem but is still a despicable bigoted person.—Claudio Carvalho, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil