This independent film, released in 1962 and based on a book by real-life psychiatrist Dr. Theodore Isaac Rubin, is surprisingly ahead of its time. It was filmed in black & white in a late autumn/winter environment, with an unsettling soundtrack which could place this movie as much in the horror genre as it could in the drama/unconventional romance category.

A young Keir Dullea (26) plays David, an autistic/Asperger's/OCD teenager enrolled in a residential school for the teenaged mentally ill, where he meets Lisa, played by Janet Margolin (19 at the time), who communicates only in ryhme and suffers from a schizophrenic split personality.

In some of the more surreal scenes, David suffers from vivid dreams in which he controls the hands of a giant clock which cuts off the heads of his enemies.

Very early in the film, Lisa is infatuated with David, and in one scene we see her in bed at night, apparently masturbating. The scene is open to interpretation, but if it is what it appears to be, this may be one of the earliest American films to feature female masturbation that was not a "blue" movie.

Eventually, the friendship/adolescent romance that David and Lisa form enables them to draw each other out of their psychoses.

Fans of film noir/psychological tension may want to check this movie out; for me at least, it was well worth the watch.