PRESSURE POINT (1962) Bobby's Darin' performance

If you have trouble buying Bobby Darin as an actor, let alone a serious one, check out PRESSURE POINT in which he portrays a loathsome and self-loathing neo-Nazi white supremacist thug. A prison psychiatrist (Sydney Poiter) tries to dig to the root of the character's raging racism, and what he discovers will scare the bejezzus out of you. How Darin managed to find this sadistic and psychotic monster in himself is as much a mystery as how, as a singer, he turned “Splish, Splash” into “Mack the Knife.” This was Darin’s cinematic performance-of-a-lifetime. If only his critics and the Academy had acknowledged it.