Today's Cinema Sunday post continues our February dive into social relevance with a film from 1948 that takes an unflinching look at mental illness and the treatment of those afflicted.
It is a movie that actually fundamentally changed how mental health was viewed and altered how patients were treated.
Today, we enter The Snake Pit.
Olivia de Havilland is Virginia Cunningham, a patient at a mental hospital called the Juniper Hill State Hospital. Apparently schizophrenic, Virginia hears voices and her perceptions of what is and isn't real are in a state of flux. Depending on the time of day, she may know she has a husband named Robert or she has no husband at all.
Over a series of flashbacks, we see the developing relationship between Virginia and Robert, a romance that blossoms and leads to marriage. But the journey to that outcome is not smooth as Virginia struggles with... well, Robert is never quite sure. Virginia is prone to disappear without warning, having strange angry outbursts, sleeplessness, losing track of time, experiencing gaps in her memory. Her behavior is erratic and self-destructive so Robert seeks help.
At Juniper Hill State Hospital, Dr. Kik tries to help Virginia get well. Yeah there's electro-shock treatment which seems to only make Virginia more erratic, anxious and frightened.
Dr. Kik has the wild idea that if he can just talk to Virginia, get her to open up about herself and her past, he can work out how to get to the root cause of her mental illness.
While Dr. Kik understands that Virginia's road to recovery is a process, it is not a concept grasped by others. No matter how many steps forward Virginia might make, any steps back marks her as a failure in her recovery. And the folks at Juniper Hill ain't got time for that.
Juniper Hill State Hospital is ridiculously overcrowded and understaffed and run less a place of healing and more like a prison. And some of the nurses function more as guards than as healers and helpers.
A particularly abusive nurse provokes a violent outburst out of Virginia which the nurse uses as an excuse to consign Virginia to the "snake pit", a hospital ward for patients considered beyond help, forced together in a large padded cell, abandoned.
The sequence where Virginia finds herself in the snake pit is a harrowing experience for her and for the viewer. The camera shows a distraught and frightened Virginia surrounded by shambling moaning woman in drab grey, milling aimlessly about like ghosts or zombies. As the camera pulls out, we see the enormity of Virginia's plight, just how large and how egregiously full this ward is. And as the camera moves up, we see the lost souls of this pit, their pathetic shambling looking much like a slithering serpent. And the walls are high and dark and craggy, like a deep pit in the ground.
Virginia Cunningham is in hell.
Dr. Kik discovers this terrible treatment of Virginia and rescues her from the pit where he resumes his therapy of just... talking to her, gaining her trust, getting her to talk to him.
Eventually, Virginia gains self-understanding which improves the state of her mental health so that she is able to leave the hospital. She is not well but she is better and capable now of fully assessing her condition and how to cope with it.
Olivia de Havilland's portrayal of Virginia is astonishingly good and deeply poignant. Virginia's state of confusion and quiet desperation, never knowing what her mind would decide to do next, not quite grasping what others are expecting of her, is particularly powerful, conveying the truly insidious pain of mental illness.
And there's the pressures on those running the mental hospital with the number of patients overwhelming it's staff and resources. For every Dr. Kik who understands recovery from mental illness is a painstaking process that does not always move forward, there are others who treat the institution like an assembly line. Patients are faced with a binary judgement: get better and get out or don't get better and be consigned to the snake pit.
There's a scene near the end where the hospital holds a dance for the patients. People like Dr. Kik thinks this will do the patients a lot of good; the crabbier attendants think this is just asking for trouble. There's a bit near the end of the dance when a patient sings a song. It's a sad song. As the camera pulls out from the singer to take in the dance floor, the song tells the tale of every patient out there: they just want to know peace and they just want to go home.
Director Anatole Litvak is good at these cinematic moments, the quiet loneliness on the dance floor and the existential horror of the snake put. But the scenes with Virginia are handled with a deft touch, capturing her humanity, her churning anxiety and her fervent desire to be well and out of this place.
Anatole Litvak and Olivia de Havilland were very committed to researching this project. They and others from the cast and crew visited various mental institutions, attended lectures by leading psychiatrists, observing hydrotherapy and electric shock treatments, sitting in (as permitted) on long individual therapy sessions and attending social functions, including dinners and dances with the patients.
When a film critic dared to question the verisimilitude of what happens in the movie, Olivia de Havilland personally called the critic to set the record straight, that what Litvak put on screen was real because Olivia herself had witnessed it herself first hand.
Horrified by what they saw in The Snake Pit, several lawmakers began drafting legislation on how mental hospitals were run and psychiatric groups began to review old ideas for treating mental health patients and embrace a more holistic approach.
Sadly, places like Juniper Hill State Hospital did not go away immediately but thanks to The Snake Pit, their excesses and cruelties were exposed, marking the beginning of the end of such horrible institutions.
Next week, we look at the world of the hearing impaired and a complex romance. Cinema Sunday turns the spotlight on Children of a Lesser God.
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