The Snake Pit (1948)

Based on author Mary Jane Ward's semi-autobiographical 1946 best seller The Snake Pit is the story of a young woman (Olivia de Havilland, amazingly still with us and will turn 100 in July) who spends the better part of a year in a state mental institution. While modern audiences have likely seen stories about mental illness and depictions of asylums and treatment centers many times before, at the time this film came out it was a pretty new and radical subject matter to build a major motion picture around. One of a number of semi documentary style social conciseness films released by 20th Century Fox in the late 1940's, with A Gentleman's Agreement being probably the best known, The Snake Pit is a little stilted and formal by todays standard but still manages to communicate well something of what serious mental illness must be like and to do so tastefully and with compassion. De Havilland's performance is strong and she is well served by a large supporting cast made up largely of much lesser known performers. When I finished this film I thought it was good but the more I thought about it the more it grew in my estimation, its so straight forward and largely free of flair (with the notable exception of the famous 'snake pit' processed shot which I though was really effective) that it might seem to underplay it potentially sensationalistic subject matter. But here I think its restraint is admirable, this was new stuff for a 1940's audience and it was so effective in what it conveyed that the film is often cited as leading directly to mental health reform in more then two dozen states. While the psychology of the film is mostly Freudian and doesn't address potential chemical and genetic causes for mental disorder, it does address its subject matter with decided empathy and humanizes the afflicted in a way that can still powerfully resonate. We are still making 'Oscar bate' movies around similar subject matter today and this is the movie that went there first. ****