Huston and his crew spent several months at Mason general and shot over 70 hours of footage from the individual counselling sessions. “Oh listen, I can talk!” he cries again and again in a rush, lying prostrate and near tears on the psychiatrist’s couch.
The therapy unblocks him, like a plunger inside a backed-up sink. Under hypnosis, the last of these patients recalls that he first began stumbling over the letter S because the sound stirred memories of the hiss of incoming German shells.
The film introduces us to a (presumably representative) cross-section of case studies: “the Man Who Could Not Walk”, “the Man Who Could Not Remember” and “the Man Who Could Not Talk”. Shuffling down the gangplank of the troop carrier, they are farmed through eight to 10 weeks of intensive therapy before being released into their old communities.
The servicemen at Mason general are all suffering from PTSD – what was known at the time as “shellshock” or “psycho-neurosis”.
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