"The Snake Pit" is a 2-hour infomercial for the then-budding (in 1948) field of psychoanalysis. Its view of mental illness was probably very enlightened for the time but seems positively quaint and, really, rather sexist by modern standards. Still, it features an excellent performance by Olivia de Havilland as a woman committed to an state mental hospital. Olivia resorts to histrionics in only a couple of scenes, and elsewhere finds many different ways to play a character who is not quite "right" - she'll be tired and dull-witted one moment, agitated and demanding the next, compassionate and troubled the next. In short, her character is schizophrenic, but she manages to make her sympathetic and complex without being pathetic. The pathos is left to the other patients in the asylum -- every character actress in Hollywood is granted a bit of screen time, and they all make the most of it. The best is the old lady who keeps a running commentary about how sick all her fellow inmates are -- she's funny enough to be a bit player in a Marx Brothers movie, but here she's quite disturbing.
Still, to enjoy Livvy and the loony ladies, you have to endure a pretty contrived plot. Virginia, as played by Olivia, starts having psychotic episodes shortly after she marries the most saintly man on Earth, Robert (played by the justly forgotten Mark Stevens). After Virginia committed, the most patient psychoanalyst in history, Dr. Mark Kik, begins piecing together the reasons for her breakdown on the assumption that understanding the source of her disorder will be the best way to cure it. Hence "The Snake Pit" is structured like a detective story, and the mystery, when revealed, isn't all that satisfying (although it does leave open the possibility that Virginia was bored senseless by her stiff of a husband). Still, the filmmakers are to be commended for their indictment of the mental-health system as brutal and inhumane. (And in truth, they make a far better case against it than "One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest" three decades later.) One wishes they hadn't been quite so blinkered by then-current prejudices, which maintained that poor mothering is the source of all evil and a woman needs a healthy relationship with a man to be rational, but on balance, "The Snake Pit" is a pretty brave film.
Still, to enjoy Livvy and the loony ladies, you have to endure a pretty contrived plot. Virginia, as played by Olivia, starts having psychotic episodes shortly after she marries the most saintly man on Earth, Robert (played by the justly forgotten Mark Stevens). After Virginia committed, the most patient psychoanalyst in history, Dr. Mark Kik, begins piecing together the reasons for her breakdown on the assumption that understanding the source of her disorder will be the best way to cure it. Hence "The Snake Pit" is structured like a detective story, and the mystery, when revealed, isn't all that satisfying (although it does leave open the possibility that Virginia was bored senseless by her stiff of a husband). Still, the filmmakers are to be commended for their indictment of the mental-health system as brutal and inhumane. (And in truth, they make a far better case against it than "One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest" three decades later.) One wishes they hadn't been quite so blinkered by then-current prejudices, which maintained that poor mothering is the source of all evil and a woman needs a healthy relationship with a man to be rational, but on balance, "The Snake Pit" is a pretty brave film.