Hitchcoc
I think one of the most terrifying things that could happen to a person is to be incarcerated in an institution where you have been judged, but you don't have the wherewithal to defend yourself. Olivia De Havilland's character is institutionalized, through her husband's actions, and doesn't know why. As she wades through her memories, she begins to come around. Unfortunately, it takes someone to believe in you to get listened to. Let's face it, the grunt workers here are full of prejudices and suspicions. These are, after all, crazy people. Things get really complicated when De Havilland's character begins to get close to a handsome doctor. She starts to come into her own a bit, loved by her fellow patients, but a woman who is jealous sets things up to get her put into "the snake pit." This is the place where the hopeless go. It sounds a good deal like Dante's circles of hell.
gavin6942
Virginia Cunningham (Olivia de Havilland) finds herself in a state insane asylum... and cannot remember how she got there. In flashback, her husband Robert relates their courtship, marriage, and her developing symptoms.Stephen King says this film terrified him as a child, because he felt that he could go crazy at any moment (and worst of all, not even be aware that he was crazy). And, indeed, there is something terrifying about this film. While many films have taken place in mental hospital, I think very few really address how normal most mentally ill people are most of the time, or the fine balance between sane and insane.I do not know much about Olivia de Havilland, but she really pulled all the stops here. If she is capable of this level of intensity, she probably should have been a bigger star than she was.
gizmoray
This was a disturbing movie to watch even though it seemed to have a happy ending. At the time I first saw the movie in the 1960's, I had a friend who was in a mental ward briefly and the scenes were frightening realistic with the characters portrayal and the prevalence of shock therapy While it is true the ending was over the top with the "Going Home' sequence, the message of hope was uplifting and was counter to the stark hard to watch struggles of daily life in the hospital. How anyone got better at all was a miracle. At least they tried to make sure the discharged patient had someplace to go unlike 'Swing Blade' where Billy Bob Thornton was just sent on his way even though he was potentially violent.
Robert J. Maxwell
A valuable corrective for the time. Most previous movies reflected the prevailing conception of the mentally ill as mad doctors, Jack the Rippers, or pseudo-comic Napoleons. This is a tour of the experiences of a real writer, "Virginia Cunningham" (de Havilland), as she has a nervous breakdown, receives treatment at a state psychiatric hospital, and is finally released to join her loving husband at home (Stevens), with the aid of her shrink (Genn).The movie is thoroughly structured, as so much of life is not, and made fit for normal consumption by being built around styles of life and ways of thinking that are familiar to most of us.The hospital is framed according to the demands of the military model. It's really a barracks full of recruits. The male doctors are the officers. The female nurses and attendants are the non-commissioned officers who provide the muscle. There's the wise guy among the patients (Ruth Donnelly) who corresponds to the smart-mouthed recruit from Brooklyn. There is even a stockade in which the cells are lined with brick and into which unruly recruits are wrapped in straight jackets and thrown.The etiology of the illnesses accord with the Freudian model. It all may have started in infancy, with a neglectful mother, developed through the Electra complex, festered during sibling rivalry, and made worse by unconscious guilt and repressed memories. All the touchstones of the psychoanalytic scenario are on display. (The writers blew a chance for picturesque symbolic dreams, though.) What you must do to get well is bring these childhood experiences and their interpretations to conscious awareness. Once you realize you married your husband because of the ways in which he resembled your beloved father, things will improve.That's a pretty viewer-friendly notion of madness. Actually, it doesn't work. Even Freud didn't think psychoanalysis would work with psychotics and he was right. This isn't the place to get into it but there's a high constitutional component in psychosis. You don't get better by achieving insights. And of course the other treatment methods we see -- hydrotherapy -- are discredited, and straight jackets are passé. Oh, how these theories and treatments come and go! Egon Muñoz won a Nobel Prize for his lobotomies. As of now, the best treatments we have for disabling mental illness are drugs. For a more person perspective on schizophrenia, see Susanna Kaysen's "Girl Interrupted" -- the well-written book, not the movie. For the mood disorders that used to be called manic-depressive, try William Styron's "Darkness Visible" or, for a slightly more technical inside view, Kay Redfield Jamison's "An Unquiet Mind." Anyway -- the obsolescent frames aside -- this was a timely movie in 1948, one of a series of problem-oriented movies that came from many of the studios. Examples included "Gentleman's Agreement" (anti-Semitism), "The Sniper" (mental illness), "Pinky" (racism), "Bad Girls" (penology) and a slew of others."The Snake Pit" was prominent among them, but of course it's still highly stylized because the typical experience of a psychotic in a state mental hospital in 1948 wasn't very dramatic. There's an amusing scene in which patients pass around a bowl of stew, each one saying, "Save some for Virginia." By the time the bowl reaches Virginia it's practically empty. It's presented as a deliberate joke being played on Virginia, but that kind of organization was absent among patients. The chief impression a visitor would have gotten was silence. In the 1960s, inmates seemed to be taking over control of all sorts of places -- college campuses, prisons, airplanes, Alcatraz Island. But nobody took over a psychiatric hospital.Olivia de Havilland does fine as Virginia. Her big wide eyes stand out in the absence of make up. She's not the cloying Melanie of "Gone With the Wind" either. She gets upset, frightened, angry, and mean. Leo Genn as the pipe-smoking, ever-understanding Doctor Kik, who saves her, has a role so stereotyped that all he has to do is walk through it but, given the strictures of the part, he's a believable enough humanitarian.Anatole Litvak did a professional job of direction. The most dramatic shot takes the camera slowly over an assembly of patients who are listening to a soprano singing the plaintive "Going Home," adapted from Dvorak's "New World Symphony." The scene panders, but it panders effectively and is quite moving.
