Snake pits

Largely by happenstance, I recently caught two films on TCM about women in mental institutions.  They attracted me as I embark on my third collaboration with Kevin O’Hara -- a book about his thirty years on the psych ward, tentatively titled Inside Bedlam: Memoirs of a Bearded Nurse. 

The Snake Pit (1948) offers a surprisingly believable portrayal of madness, and with her performance here, I finally forgive Olivia de Havilland for Melanie Wilkes.  Despite the lurid title, Anatole Litvak takes a fairly serious look within the walls of a state mental hospital, with a few effectively expressionistic touches.  Therapies like electroshock, ice immersion, and chemical injection are portrayed in an unsensational manner, but the film’s heart belongs to Dr. Freud, whose portrait hangs prominently in the office of the sympathetic psychiatrist played by Leo Genn.  Sure, it’s a melodrama characteristic of its era, but this film is something more than a period piece.

Frances (1982), on the other hand, is nothing if not a sensational period piece.  The attraction of this biopic is definitely Jessica Lange’s steamy portrayal of Thirties actress Frances Farmer.  Is it just me, or is it hot in here?  Certainly Jessica as Frances is hotheaded enough, shamelessly over the top, but we don’t end up with any real sense of her character.  Much of the period detail, such as her affair with Clifford Odets and sojourn with the Group Theater, is interesting, but when Frances is thrown in the loony bin for deviant behavior, the film goes crazy too, throwing in lobotomy and rape to go with shock treatment.

Elevator to the Gallows (1957) doesn’t really fit under this rubric, but I won’t get around to commenting on it otherwise.  Louis Malle’s first film has been released by the Criterion Collection as a sort of ur-text of the French New Wave, and it does have some historical interest in that respect.  Certainly the paradigm of a girl, a gun, and a car that made Breathless famous is already evident here, as are Jeanne Moreau and Maurice Ronet as lovers conspiring to murder her husband.  The thriller business of a stuck elevator, and the twist that foils the perfect crime are handled well enough, but certainly the most exciting element of the film is the music by Miles Davis, which throws an aura of cool over the whole enterprise.