Shocker

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The woman with the lovely face is screaming. Her dark eyes are luminous with horror. She seems to be hanging perilously to the very edge of a cliff, while far below is a dizzying view of the pounding ocean. Somebody is trying to push her off.

Last week, in the opulent gloom of movie theaters in Manhattan and Chicago, the lovely woman screamed & screamed. For a moment, the scene looked exactly like the old-fashioned thrill shot that moviemakers call a "cliff-hanger." But what moviegoers were actually getting was a breathtaking glimpse of an abyss in the infinite mountains of the mind.

Hollywood, certainly not the sanest community on earth, has managed to turn out an excellent movie about insanity. The Snake Pit (20th Century-Fox), starring Olivia de Havilland, is not a great work of cinematic art. It is, like the frightening scream from Miss de Havilland which rattles its sound track, an honest, accurate and dramatically powerful echo of certain ugly facts of modern life. It does what Hollywood has rarely done before: look harsh reality in the eye. Backed by enthusiastic reviews and smash box-office success in two big cities, The Snake Pit will be released next month throughout the U.S.

The Theme. Mental illness is no novel subject for the movies. Hollywood has long since taken note of modern man's discovery, and worship, of the subconscious--that obscure force which has become more fashionable than God's or man's will as an explanation of all human acts. Various types of mental sickness (amnesia, etc.) have been used and used again as springboards for psychological thrillers. In fact, the theme has become so familiar that a relatively new visual idiom has been worn down into a bag of movie cliches (the close-up of the vague eye, the trick shot of all outdoors whirling round & round, the heart beating an audible tom-tom, the psychiatrist with his smooth sofa-side manner).

Yet for all his short-cut courses in psychiatry, the moviegoer has been shown very little of what can happen to him when he.ceases to be just interestingly neurotic and actually gets locked up. Few Americans are aware that more than half a million men, women & children in the U.S. are in mental hospitals, mostly state institutions; another estimated 7,000,000, although at large, suffer from some kind of mental illness. The state institutions are desperately overcrowded and understaffed.

The world no longer throws its mentally sick into snake pits, on the theory, once widely held, that an experience which might drive a sane person out of his mind might drive an insane one back into it. But snake pits still exist. The Shame of the States, a recently published, chillingly factual report on conditions in state mental hospitals (see MEDICINE), reveals horrors in the midst of the world's wealthiest, healthiest country which many Americans may refuse to believe. The large, hidden population of the mentally ill lives amid squalor, dirt and creeping fear, in the solitary confinement of the sick mind and behind the walls of the world's indifference.

That is the shocking theme of The Snake Pit.

The Plunge. In 1945, while he was still in the U.S. Army making movies for the War Department, Director Anatole Litvak (Mayerling, All This and Heaven Too, Sorry, Wrong Number) read the galley proofs of Mary Jane Ward's partly autobiographical novel about a young woman's harrowing experiences in a state mental hospital. Litvak arranged to buy the film rights to the book for $75,000 of his own money, payable in installments ("As I kept paying, I got broker and broker"). The novel became a bestseller, but for over a year he had no luck persuading anyone to back a movie. Says he: "They all thought I was as crazy as the girl in the book."

Then in stepped 20th Century-Fox's Darryl Francis ("The Little Colonel") Zanuck. Zanuck had been bold enough to make The Grapes of Wrath, The Ox-Bow Incident, Wilson and Gentleman's Agreement. He was not afraid of The Snake Pit. He bought the movie rights from Litvak for $175,000 and assigned him (together with veteran Fox Producer Robert Bassler) to make the film.

One idyllically sunny afternoon not long ago, Mr. Zanuck walked excitedly up & down on the close-cropped lawn in front of his office, smoking a cigar eight inches long, and explaining to a group of associates and visitors how hard a decision it had been to make (one wag has described these outdoor conferences as "Zanuck on the grass, alas"). "When we began on that picture," said Zanuck, "the movie depression had set in. This was a time you felt that in order to get your money back you had to throw everything into a picture including Betty Grable, Clark Gable and Technicolor. Why, one day my wife said: 'God, it says here you bought The Snake Pit. This is terrible. I won't even read it.?"

The Snake Pit proved to be an extraordinary undertaking. In making it, the vast Hollywood machine designed to disguise and prettify reality had to be swung into reverse.

Producer-Director Litvak started out by visiting typical American state institutions. He made all the leading members of the cast and the technical staff do the same. He even hid microphones in several wards at night to record the cries and mutterings of fear that came from the unquiet sleepers. One of the most striking things in The Snake Pit is its faces--the blanched, defenseless, suspicious, suffering faces, oddly but not artily assembled, which form the tragic chorus to the story.

The hairdressers, who are normally paid to keep players' hair superhumanly sleek (and whose fussing always annoyed Litvak) were flatly banished from the set. The woman players had strict orders to leave their girdles and brassieres in the dressing rooms.

The sets and the extras moving through them were so authentic that, after eleven weeks of shooting, the atmosphere on the huge sound stage often became intensely uncomfortable. "Juniper Hill State Hospital" grew as real to the actors' eyes as to the camera's lens. At one point, an elderly extra, abstractedly scratching her stomach, turned to one of the actresses and said: "Hey, didja ever see so many characters in one place?" As the actress recalls it: "Suddenly it struck me--my God, maybe I am crazy. What's the norm? How can you tell?" When the superintendent of nurses at a California institution visited the set, she looked at the sobbing, muttering, staring women and said: "Why, they all look like my own girls."

The Story. The Snake Pit is the story of Virginia Cunningham (Miss de Havilland) who loses her mind, spends about a year in a state institution, and is released as cured. In the novel, the heroine's illness and its treatment remained undefined. Dramatically compressing the somewhat rambling original story, Scriptwriters Millen (The Outward Room) Brand and Frank Partos added a brand-new doctor and gave the heroine a brand-new case history.

As played by British Actor Leo Genn (recently seen in Mourning Becomes Electra and memorable as the sardonic Lord Constable of France in Henry V), Dr. Kik is the ideal psychoanalyst--patient, handsome, experienced and endowed with a deep, beautiful voice as intricately gentle as a surgeon's hands. He is the perfect Freudian knight and the picture's real hero.

The heroine's case history is based on precisely the kind of Freudian detective work which the book avoided. The writers decided that Virginia Cunningham was a schizophrenic,* suffering from the most common of the serious mental diseases. As the cause of her difficulties, they chose inadequate parents, who burdened her with a guilt complex plus a father fixation. The case history, revealed in a series of flashbacks throughout the picture, includes familiar items: a little girl who loves her father but feels rejected by him, a broken doll identified with Daddy, a husband whom the heroine cannot love because of the lingering subconscious attachment for her father, etc., etc.

The case history was worked out in close collaboration with three prominent psychiatrists, and experts claim that it is accurate and typical. It nevertheless remains artistically the weakest part of the picture. Perhaps if King Lear or Hamlet had been written with the assistance of three prominent psychiatrists, the great tragedies would have bogged down in clinical detail and collapsed under the weight of father complexes and mother fixations.

But for the most part, the adapters have admirably preserved the painful mood, the wry humor and the shock value of the book. Producer-Director Litvak has drawn from their script a picture which is, in many ways, better than the novel.

Circles of Hell. The camera first discovers Virginia Cunningham sitting on a bench in the sun. A disembodied voice asks her where she is. She does not know. The camera, following her inside a hulking grey building, discovers (as if through her bewildered eyes) the locked doors, the prison bars, the caged human figures. Casually it takes in such alarming details as a woman giggling to herself, another sitting on the floor. Later, it surveys the rows of beds in the dormitory at night, when Virginia first realizes where she is, while the soundtrack weaves a chilling pattern of the weeping, moaning and plaintive singing that come from the separate nightmares.

The picture follows Virginia's progress through the various wards, divided into descending degrees of misery, like the circles of hell. Throughout, it preserves the novel's sharply observed minor touches of asylum life--the nurses' way of speaking in front of inmates as if they weren't there (as some adults speak in front of children); the strange snobbery of the sick who look down on their sicker fellows; the large-looming small idiocies of institutional bureaucracy, such as the clean carpet in one ward which must not be stepped on (and the wonderful old woman who jumps on it and dances a defiant Charleston).

The picture's greatest merit is its memorable types: the inarticulate young girl whose frozen, dangerous fear seems to choke her like a stone lodged in the throat; the nurse whose own mind has worked loose in the buffeting, jarring atmosphere of the asylum and who now wanders through her ward, forlornly keeping imaginary records.

The Director. Producer-Director Litvak, a strong believer in psychoanalysis, tells his story with great simplicity and sympathy. There are times when the simplicity verges on the obvious. But his best scenes are superb. The finest, based mostly on Litvak's observations in the asylums he visited, is laid in the "disturbed" ward. There, amid the weirdly unrestrained babble, the camera makes its way from figure to figure: the girl who slinkily dances about in a pathetic imitation of an evening gown, the woman crouched praying on the floor, the girl with the Ana Pauker haircut pleading "in the name of the Party" that she is not insane. Then, approximating Virginia Cunningham's own sudden detachment, the camera pulls back & up, gathering the diverse figures in a kind of ballet; pulling higher & higher until the wardful of writhing figures below looks like the snake pit which gives the picture its name.

Another excellent scene: an asylum dance. On one side of the hall the women are lined up, coquettish in spite of their drabness; on the other side are the slicked-down men with little bouquets and candy boxes in their hands. To the stringy tune of a bored band, the partners hop and skip through their dance, distorting it like forlorn children at dancing school. The scene is only slightly harmed by an overlong, over-sentimental group singing of Going Home, timed with the heroine's own realization that she is indeed going home.

Here & there the picture shows glints of a typically slick Hollywood finish. It is more specious than convincing when it tries to get across the point that schizophrenia is something that "can happen to anybody." And Virginia's cure, once she turns the corner, seems suspiciously quick, easy and well-timed for a happy ending (in reality, she might very likely suffer a relapse). But with all its minor faults, The Snake Pit is an important motion picture. One of its notable achievements is that it establishes Olivia de Havilland not so much as a star, a dubious title she already held, but as an actress.

The Actress. The De Havilland performance is happily free of the traditional weeping and gnashing of teeth which most actors seem to relish in "mad" parts. Her Virginia is not thrashing about in darkness, but is blinded and bewildered by too much light. What gives her bewilderment a special quality is the firm, almost prim, dignity which she sustains even in the animal moments of Virginia's madness. She is excellent in the little scenes of rebellion--carefully preserved from the novel--with which Virginia tries to shake off her fate. And she can speak lines of questionable worth with a childish innocence that takes the curse off their calculated pathos--as when she says during a picnic with her husband: "Then I've lost another day. I don't suppose I'll ever find it." (The husband--one of those thankless, long-suffering bystander parts which might have been merely sappy--is ably played by Mark Stevens.)

The dominant quality of De Havil-land's Virginia is the contrast between her madness and the pretty, still-young face. In her case, insanity seems as" incongruous as in Ophelia's. This quality gives her entire performance the profound sadness of Laertes' question: . . . Is't possible a young maid's wits should be as mortal as an old man's life?

Although she made her first movie 14 years ago, and has since done some skilled acting (Gone With the Wind, Hold Back the Dawn, To Each His Own--which won her the Academy Award in 1947), few people in or out of Hollywood know very much about Olivia de Havilland. "Livvie" has long been the subject of much amateur psychoanalysis among her friends and acquaintances.

Some provocative facts are known. She has been engaged in a long, bitter, on-&-off feud with her cinemactress sister, Joan Fontaine (no one has figured out any specific reason for the ill-feeling, beyond the fact that both are high-strung young women and in a sense professional rivals). She has, during a decade as "Hollywood's Bachelor Girl," been "linked" romantically in the gossip columns with many of the community's most prominent men, from Jimmy Stewart to Howard Hughes. She is suspected of being an "intellectual." She has a hardheaded, serious-minded approach to her career (she is probably Hollywood's only star who regularly reads the Wall Street Journal). Trying to add these things up remains a favorite game at Hollywood dinner parties.

Second Witch & Violet. Olivia's own case history would probably begin with her father. Walter de Havilland was a British patent attorney living in Tokyo, where Olivia was born in 1916. When she was about eight, an event occurred which --as any cocktail party psychoanalyst knows--was enough to give her complexes to last a lifetime. Her father (in the words of wife Lilian, he "spoke like God but behaved like the devil") decided to leave his wife and marry the De Havillands' Japanese maid. Mrs. de Havilland had already taken Olivia and her younger sister Joan to Saratoga, Calif. There, after divorcing Walter de Havilland, she married George M. Fontaine, manager of a local department store.

Stern, stiff-necked Stepfather Fontaine ruled the household pretty much as though it were a department in his store. He imposed all manner of hard rules, including a strict lights-out at 8:15. Livvie had to study in bed, with a flashlight underneath her blanket.

Although painfully shy, nine-year-old Olivia was already an actress. In a school Hansel and Gretel, she played the mother, the head angel and the second witch--and bitterly resented not being cast as Gretel. But Stepfather Fontaine disapproved of the stage. In her junior year in high school, when he forbade her to play Violet in Mrs. Bumpstead-Leigh, Olivia left home. Although she later made her peace with her stepfather, she "never slept under that roof again."

On the day of this domestic upheaval, Mrs. de Havilland-Fontaine had a date with her bridge club. The ladies were so moved by the story of young Olivia's plight that they raised $200 to help her out. Olivia boarded with a respectable lady and went on triumphantly as Violet. Ever since, except for a brief spell of discouragement when she thought of becoming a speech teacher, Olivia has pursued her profession with the same energy and bounce that led her high-school class to predict that she would become a "circus queen."

Her professional career started under the cold, sharp eye of the great Max Reinhardt. On the recommendation of a friend of a friend, Reinhardt hired her as understudy to the understudy of Hermia in his 1934 Hollywood Bowl production of A Midsummer Night's Dream. True to the old backstage plot tradition, the first-string Hermia got a movie offer, the second-stringer fell ill, and Olivia took the part. Movie Producer Henry Blanke, who dropped in on one of the rehearsals, noticed her. He thought she would be right for Hermia in the movie version of Dream which he was to produce and Reinhardt to co-direct for Warner. Excitedly, he asked Reinhardt to introduce him "to the girl over there with the esthetic face."

Warners' Girl. Olivia's professional life was thus entrusted to the guardianship of the Warner Brothers. After her ethereal job in A Midsummer Night's Dream, the girl with the esthetic face was cast as the cutie-heroine of Alibi Ike, a baseball picture starring Joe E. Brown. Later she appeared as the ingenue in Captain Blood, opposite Errol Flynn. Henceforth she was frozen into a cycle of Flynn-flam. Says she: "It almost drove me crazy."

With a will as hard as the heart of a front-office executive, Olivia prepared to fight Hollywood for a place as an actress. To build up a reserve, she saved money, chiefly by cutting down on clothes. When Warner tried to put her back into the slush-mines after lending her out to play Melanie in Gone With the Wind, she rebelled and was suspended for a total of six months. Her seven-year contract at last expired (in 1943) and Warner tried to make her serve the extra six months she had "lost." Against the advice of everyone in the profession, she carried the case through three courts, at a cost of $13,000 of her own money and a year and a half of her time, during which no studio would employ her. She won the case. For going to war against a major studio (had she lost, it might have ended her career), Olivia has remained something of a Hollywood Joan of Arc.

"What's the Guy Got?" Nothing has surprised students of Olivia de Havil-land's case history more than her 1946 marriage to Marcus Goodrich. Hollywood knew little about him, except that he had written one Kiplingesque novel (Delilah), and had been married four times. She was 30, he 48. "I can't understand it," said one of her friends recently. "What has this guy got? If he was some young punk who just bowled her over . . . But how, how could this happen?"

The legend has built up that Goodrich is a sort of Svengali; actually, he is a fine figure of a Naval Reserve officer with a quarterdeck voice and a manner to match. With him, Olivia has emphatically settled down. She has dropped all the friends of her fluttery, bachelor-girl days. When one of them (a middle-aged producer) recently tried to speak to her on the phone, he was informed that Mrs. Goodrich's former bachelor friends were no longer welcome. Said the dazed producer later: "What do I have to do to talk to her--get married?"

Goodrich's own view of his wife (he discusses her at length and objectively, in her presence, while she listens meekly) is that she needs a firm hand. He watches over her, keeps an eye on her business and social engagements, sees that she gets enough sleep, discourages overwork. She rarely stops acting (or rehearsing) when she leaves the set. During the shooting of The Snake Pit she practiced her screams so convincingly at home that soon all Hollywood was abuzz with the story that that man Goodrich was beating his wife. To disprove it, Goodrich finally took to sitting in the patio in full view of the neighbors while Olivia went on screaming inside.

In her hard-won freedom from studio dictates, she now freelances and chooses her roles with meticulous care (she has read and rejected over 100 stories this year). She has just finished The Heiress for Paramount. Her great ambition is to play Juliet on the stage (Max Reinhardt's suggestion for her). She is frankly delighted with The Snake Pit: "Thank God that was me in it."

The Note of Hope. Snake Pit's merit as a movie may be generally acknowledged; its value as an enlightening document may be questioned. Some hard-to-please movie critics have suggested that the picture might be harmful to the young and to the emotionally unstable, and that it should therefore be shown only to limited audiences. Psychiatrists, who have deplored most Hollywood explorations (and vulgarizations) of their specialty, disagree; they commend The Snake Pit in terms which studio pressagents could not improve on. It has even been seriously suggested that the picture be shown to borderline cases and patients. Said one Manhattan psychiatrist: "It would give them a feeling of hope for their own recovery."

Actually, the producers have gone out of their way to give the picture a tone of hope. They have, perhaps, gone a little too far. Even the hospital conditions shown in the picture, bad as they are, are actually far better than those in most state institutions.

Thus far, audiences have shown one remarkable reaction. Many have tittered at times, or laughed out loud at the grotesquely pathetic antics of the mad. This laughter is probably no more than a release from nervous strain. In a sense, occasional nervous laughter at The Snake Pit is a measure of its excellence: U.S. moviegoers are not usually troubled by overdoses of reality. The Snake Pit suggests that Hollywood itself might even be cured some day of its own mild schizophrenia, which has made it live for so long in a world of fancy. It also suggests--at a time when Hollywood is desperately looking for a gimmick or a switcheroo to pull it out of-the "movie depression"--that good pictures may offer a radical but not impossible solution.

To most of its makers, The Snake Pit has been more than a good movie. Olivia de Havilland expresses their feelings when she says: "This picture is going to do so much good. When I visited the institutions for the mentally ill, I felt a great surge of compassion for the people. We are all victims of life, you see, and these people are the ones who have been hardest pressed."

-One who cannot face certain unpleasant realities and so withdraws into an unreal world of his own.

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