Anatole Litvak (1948)
Many mental illness movies later, it’s not hard to find things in The Snake Pit that now seem corny and overwrought. Perhaps they looked that way even in 1948 but this was a seriously ambitious film – an interesting and sometimes persuasive one too. The ambition delivered real changes in mental health care in the United States. According to Wikipedia, ‘Publicity releases from 20th Century Fox claimed that twenty-six of the then forty-eight states … enacted reform legislation because of the movie’ albeit ‘This is a very difficult claim to verify because few of the bills introduced, regulations changed or funding increases implemented specifically mentioned The Snake Pit as a motivating factor’. The film, with a screenplay by Frank Partos and Millen Brand, is based on a 1946 novel of the same name by Mary Jane Ward.
Virginia Stuart Cunningham (Olivia de Havilland) is a mental patient at the Juniper Hill State Hospital. She hears voices in her head, suspects the people she encounters aren’t who they appear or claim to be, and is disconnected from reality – to the extent that, in an early scene, she can’t recognise her husband Robert (Mark Stevens). Before long, he is describing to Virginia’s therapist, Dr Kik (Leo Genn), how the couple first got to know each other in Chicago, how they met up again and married in New York. Robert’s acknowledgement, in conversation with Kik, that there were small warning signs of mental instability from an early stage in the relationship is an understatement – in the flashbacks that we see Virginia’s outbursts of seemingly irrational anxiety are hardly minor. But we get the point Robert is making: when you’re in love, you’re not on the lookout for symptoms of something wrong.
Freud’s photograph keeps watch on the wall of Dr Kik’s office and the film is a conscientious attempt to do Freudian psychotherapy justice. As you’d expect, The Snake Pit is structured as a mystery story, and the solution to the mystery is to be found in Virginia’s past, but there isn’t a single traumatic event that reveals all – rather, as Kik explains in due course, a complex of contributory factors. There are positives and negatives to this relatively nuanced approach (relative, that is, to Hollywood conventions of the time and for decades afterwards). We learn that Virginia was so shocked when her pompous, calling-the-tune boyfriend Gordon (Leif Erickson) decided they should marry that she asked him to turn his car around and take her back home; they crashed on the way there, Gordon was killed and Virginia has been mired in guilt ever since. The psychological mystery narrative then marks time until we discover why Virginia was appalled by the prospect of marriage but Anatole Litvak puts some of that time to good use.
The description of life at Juniper Hill isn’t merely a series of melodramatic incidents. Litvak and the screenwriters get across – mostly economically – an idea of the tensions among the senior staff of the institution and the anxieties of some of the nurses. There’s transference at work in Virginia’s feelings for Dr Kik; there’s also a frustrated passion for him on the part of the sinister Nurse Davis (Helen Craig). The presentation of issues in contemporary mental health care provision – the controversy of electric shock treatment, a lack of resources to cope with increasing numbers of patients – isn’t subtle or imaginative. The fact that these issues are being presented at all commands, however, a deal of respect for what the movie is trying to do. Alfred Newman’s hysterical score tends to give unwanted assistance to the action although my impression was that Litvak used the music increasingly sparingly. At any rate, there’s one scene – among the film’s most potent scene – in which its absence is striking. Virginia and Robert, along with other patients and their visitors, are sitting in a café. There are moments here when the boundaries between the residents of Juniper Hill and those from the ‘normal’ outside world are blurred. As a result, the outbursts of disruptive behaviour in this sequence have a startling impact.
There are crudely overdone things in the film. On her first interview with senior staff of the hospital to determine if she’s well enough to leave Juniper Hill, Virginia is traumatised by one of the doctors (Howard Freeman), who remonstrates with her by gesturing angrily, a couple of inches away from her face, with a very phallic cigar in his hand. According to the numbering system for wards in the hospital, the lower the number the closer a patient is to release: Virginia, after progressing to Ward 1, misbehaves, is put in a straitjacket and gets relegated to Ward 33. This provides the opportunity for a sequence in which the hopeless cases of Ward 33 dance or sing or talk to themselves in a choreographed set piece – in other words, in the time-honoured fashion of inmates of mental hospitals located on a movie screen rather than in the real world. The image that gives the piece its title – Virginia experiences the sense of looking down on herself and the other patients from a great height, of seeing them and her writhing like snakes in a pit – is very showy, although it’s undeniably distinctive. There are some good highlights too. After a nurse has warned the women to keep off an allegedly expensive rug in the centre of the general room on one of the wards, an elderly patient (Bee Humphries) immediately launches herself transgressively onto the rug – and into a vivid song and dance to ‘Sweet Georgia Brown’.
Virginia’s husband Robert is intelligently underplayed by Mark Stevens: there’s a surprising but effective resonance between his gentle charm and the more extrovert appeal of Virginia’s father (Damian O’Flynn), in the revelatory flashbacks to her childhood. (Lora Lee Michel is the six-year-old Virginia, and pretty good; Natalie Schafer is her cold mother.) While some of the patients – such as Beulah Bondi’s Mrs Greer, swathed in delusions of grandeur – are obvious theatrical turns, others – particularly Ruth Donnelly’s tough-old-broad Ruth – have a penetrating credibility and humour. The largely silent character of Hester is a familiar and fey conception but Betsy Blair (best known for her role in Marty a few years later) is engaging in the role. Celeste Holm has only a couple of scenes as a patient called Grace but she’s good, as usual. As (the symbolically named?) Virginia, Olivia de Havilland gives one of her finest performances. This is rarely a spectacularly histrionic portrait of a person suffering from mental illness. Although de Havilland is vocally and emotionally powerful on the few occasions Virginia loses control, her characterisation is more impressive in how persistently believable she makes the protagonist’s confused apprehension of the world around and inside her. There’s a wealth of well-observed gesture and plenty of comic skill in de Havilland’s playing.
Late on in the film, the climax to a social for the Juniper Hill inmates is a solo sung by one of the patients (Jan Clayton) to music from the largo movement of Dvořák’s ‘From the New World’ symphony, with lyrics by Williams Arms Fisher:
‘Goin’ home. Goin’ home. I’m a-goin’ home.
Quiet-like some still day, I’m just goin’ home.
It’s not far, just close by, through an open door.
Work all done, cares laid by, goin’ to roam no more;
Mother’s there ‘xpecting me, father’s waiting, too,
Lots of folks gathered there, all the friends I knew …’
The whole gathering joins in. There’s a sea of faces shining with tears and hope for happy returns. The moment is meant to be heartwarming. Yet the import of the lyrics, in the Freudian context of the story the film has told, is jarring: the definition of ‘home’ and the news that ‘Mother’s there ‘xpecting me’ are – for a woman with an Electra complex, as Virginia seems to have – troubling. The penultimate scene of the film, in which the heroine says goodbye to Dr Kik (before being reunited with her husband), is more satisfying. She tells him she knew she was getting better when she realised she was no longer in love with Kik. ‘You never were in love with me,’ he smiles but the look in his eyes as he watches her move away makes clear that Kik’s feelings for Virginia went beyond a doctor’s sympathy for his patient. The juxtaposition of these two sequences illustrates the film’s greater success (as a piece of drama) in exploring individuals than in realising the lives of ‘the mentally ill’ generally.
One unsolved mystery of the movie, while I was watching, was why a fictional character had the extraordinary name of Dr Mark H Kensdelaerik – ‘Kik’, for short. According to the website http://www.filmsgraded.com/:
‘… the novel was autobiographical. [Mary Jane] Ward had been institutionalized, and effectively rescued by a brilliant psychoanalyst, Dr Gerard Chrzanowski, who told others to refer to him as “Dr Kik” since it was easier for Americans to pronounce’.’
A couple of other things that I still don’t understand. First, the significance of the twelfth of May, mention of which Virginia reacts so badly to in her early meetings with Robert: was Gordon killed and/or did her father die on this date? Second, is Juniper Hill women-only? It seems so most of the time but, in that case, where do the male mental patients come from for the social events at the hospital that require their presence?
18 July 2016
