David and Lisa

David is clever, cold, and lets nobody touch him. He believes a touch will kill him. He is admitted to a psychiatric clinic. Lisa is there: a girl who can only speak in rhyme and who moves between two separate personalities. The two of them understand each other. Frank Perry directs, in his first feature, from a screenplay by his wife Eleanor Perry. Keir Dullea plays David and Janet Margolin plays Lisa. The source is a book by the psychiatrist Theodore Isaac Rubin. The conditions of production matter as much as the story. It was made outside the studios and independently for a few hundred thousand dollars, and counts among the first American independent films of the sixties. Its approach was new for the time. Mental illness is used neither as horror nor as a comic type; two young people behave consistently within their own logic, and the treating doctor is a patient, modest figure. It was nominated for the directing and adapted screenplay Oscars, an extraordinary result for an independent film at that scale. Keir Dullea would become known six years later in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Who it is for: viewers who like sixties American independent cinema and psychological drama. Who it is not for: the understanding of psychiatry belongs to its period and is simplistic now, and the last section is fast and optimistic.