THE SNAKE PIT (Anatole Litvak, 1948)

Mary Jane Ward’s fictionalized account of her mental illness and treatment in a state asylum, The Snake Pit, became a film whose popular success—the book also was a bestseller—motivated Congress to legislate improvements in the U.S. mental health care system. Indeed, it is a famous film on many scores, winning Anatole Litvak his only Oscar nomination for direction and star Olivia de Havilland a unanimous victory in the year-end voting of the New York Film Critics Circle in the category of best actress—an accomplishment no other actor had achieved or would duplicate. Strong, engrossing, moving, this remains a good film, if not quite the great one it was once considered to be, and de Havilland’s performance, for which she was also honored at Venice (and by Italy’s film journalists and, at home, by the National Board of Review), is generally considered the most brilliant of her career—although her two Oscars were for other films: To Each His Own (Mitchell Leisen, 1946) and The Heiress (William Wyler, 1949). All three films were released during the short period when Hollywood was promoting de Havilland as “the dramatic queen of the screen.”

Virginia Cunningham is the name given to the character that is based on Mary Jane Ward. Whereas in reality Ward had begun her treatment in a private facility and was moved to a state one only after her spouse had exhausted their financial resources, in the film, for the sake of dramatic compression, Cunningham’s entire confinement and treatment occur in the state facility. Somewhat ridiculously, some commentators have complained that the psychoanalytical puzzle-solving that “cures” Cunningham is outdated and simplistic, but of course it is representative of Virginia’s treatment, not a literal account of it, again a form of dramatic streamlining, and as such it works, and continues to work, just fine. For the record, however, Ward’s lead doctor disapproved of his patient’s premature release and predicted recurrences of her psychosis. Ward in fact suffered two subsequent nervous breakdowns. For me, this does not put the film’s upbeat ending at variance with the truth, because the emotional charge of the closing scene, when Virginia Cunningham, “going home,” leaves by bus with her husband, Robert, conveys immense hopefulness, not any certain erasure of mental problems. Her treatment, we feel, has given Virginia some capacity to cope with her problems; it hasn’t dissolved them. Rather, the whole emphasis of the final scene is on Virginia’s joy at the prospect of returning home and resuming her marriage. It is her release from a kind of incarceration that sets the viewer’s heart to soaring, not any conviction of total cure—at least this is how the film’s ending strikes me. One of my complaints about the film—for me, a rare complaint about any film—is that this ending comes abruptly and too soon. The film might have taken fifteen or twenty minutes more to establish a more convincing basis for the patient’s release. On the other hand, the film stresses that the asylum board that permits Cunningham’s release is largely motivated by its desire to free a bed in the overcrowded facility.

Freudian psychology had entered the Hollywood (and, through it, the U.S.) mainstream. Litvak’s film followed such other films involving psychiatry or Freudian psychoanalysis as Lady in the Dark (Leisen, 1944), The Locket (John Brahm, 1946) and Possessed (Curtis Bernhardt, 1947). In all these films the patient, either neurotic or psychotic, is a woman, but in Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound (1945) the patient is male and the doctor, who falls in love with him before he becomes her patient, is female, although she joins forces with her male mentor in pursuit of a solution to the patient’s psychosis. In Litvak’s film, Virginia falls in love with her doctor, or thinks she does, and a point along the way of her recovery is marked by her realization that she isn’t really in love with him. Throughout the time that she does believe she is in love with doctor, however, she is coldly opposed at every turn by the nurse who is secretly in love with the same doctor. When with regrettable razor-sharp insight Virginia confronts the nurse with her—the nurse’s—sexual feelings for the doctor, the nurse retaliates with even more unpleasantness and cruelty. At the very least, their contest jeopardizes Virginia’s efforts at recovery.

The title of both book and film refers to an ancient method for curing insanity: consigning the insane to a pit of snakes. In the film, Virginia imagines herself in a snake pit; she is in one, the “snakes” on one level being her sister patients, and yet at the same time she is above the pit, looking down into it and seeing herself and the others. She also literally sees snakes. This simultaneous double perspective—inside/outside; Virginia’s experiencing what she experiences in the asylum, and observing this and (as voiceover) commenting on it—is part of the film’s narrative method for conveying Virginia’s welter of feelings, including her acute selfconsciousness, and the difficulty with which Virginia tries to make sense of her situation.

Sound is very important in this film.* The first sound we hear is that of a bird chirping. It belongs, we soon discover, to a bird perched on a tree branch on the asylum grounds. Virginia is looking up at it, smiling, while sitting on a bench. All of a sudden Virginia is confronted with an interiorized bodiless voice, that of her doctor, “Dr. Kik” (Leo Genn, excellent), the nickname of Ward’s actual doctor, Dr. Chrzanowski. (Gerald is the first name of Ward’s doctor; Mark, of the one here—an interesting change since Mark is the first name of Mark Stevens, the actor who plays Virginia’s husband.) Virginia cannot attach the male voice to any form within the range of her sight; but then she sees, also sitting on a bench, a sister patient, Grace (Celeste Holm, giving a rare good performance—her best, in fact). We learn from what Virginia thinks to herself, which we hear as voiceover, that she suspects that Grace is a disguised form of whatever man she had heard speaking, whose identity she cannot place. Nor does Virginia know precisely where she is. Once inside, she guesses that she is in prison for some crime she committed that she cannot recall, or perhaps, because she was indeed a writer, she is there on assignment. The contrast between decorous Grace, who anxiously keeps trying to rein in Virginia, and outspoken Virginia corroborates what Grace has already suggested: that she is about to leave the asylum as cured, while Virginia remains entrenched in her psychosis. Virginia is insane; Grace must have been this once. Now Grace is poised to go home; one day, the film’s opening movement suggests, Virginia also may be well enough to go home. In the context of all this, the bird’s natural freedom—with a companion, the bird had left the branch for the sky—assumes a delicate, retroactive note of poignancy. Something else occurs once Virginia is indoors: she is addressed by Dr. Kik, giving actual form to the voice that Virginia had imagined hearing outside. “Do you know who I am, Mrs. Cunningham?” he asks. Of course she does: “You’re the warden.” Neither does Virginia recognize her husband, alternating between maintaining her maiden identity, Virginia Stuart, and insisting that she is married though without benefit of a husband. This inconsistency, along with others, is compounded by Virginia’s alternating forthrightness and confusion, and by something else: the discrepancy in sound, and the emotional realities attached to that discrepancy, between the Virginia we objectively observe and the subjective Virginia whose interior thoughts we hear as voiceover. The method of this film, the way it portrays Virginia Cunningham on different levels, is clear and complex.

A sound that recurs in The Snake Pit is that of the electro-shock machine that is used to “make contact” with patients. It is a horrifying sound, a horrifying machine. Robert Cunningham hesitates a bit in signing the consent form for its use on his wife. “Is there no other way?” he asks Dr. Kik. “Yes, if we had time,” Kik replies. “We’re short of many things in a state hospital, but time most of all.”

Looking up at a bird in a tree: looking up is a motif in this film. Later, we watch Virginia look up from the bottom of the snake pit that she imagines herself inhabiting. The distance in this case, between Virginia and the top of the pit that she is looking at, is far greater than the distance between her and the bird. Striking her as an insurmountable climb, it pertains to her sense of the impossibility of her recovery and freedom. Indeed, the entire hospital is structured as a progressive series of floors correlative to the degree of recovery that patients are adjudged to have attained. Owing something, perhaps, to Dante’s Divine Comedy, the higher one’s floor, the closer one is to exiting the asylum and rejoining the world. But, as will happen in Virginia’s case, some patients do not go up and out; sometimes patients slip down, even by more than one floor at a time. This possibility also relates to the daunting climb one finds before oneself when one is at the bottom of the snake pit.

Going home. I can take Litvak (This Above All, 1942; Sorry, Wrong Number, 1948) or leave Litvak (All This, and Heaven Too, 1940; Decision Before Dawn, 1951); but The Snake Pit contains the single greatest shot to grace his œuvre. With Virginia, on the road to recovery, in attendance, the hospital holds a dance. On a platform at one end of the huge hall one of the patients stands and sings “Goin’ Home,” the pseudo-American folk spiritual adapted from the largo of Dvořák’s Symphony No. 9—the New World Symphony. The song, of course, expresses the hopes of every patient there, but, for us, especially Virginia. The camera swoops over the heads of all the people facing the stage, ending in closeup on the one who is singing (Lassie’s television “mother,” Jan Clayton—recently, the original Julie Jordan of Broadway’s Carousel). Thus in one sweeping, heart-piercing camera movement, Litvak relates everyone listening to this sister patient’s singing to her, her song, its feeling.

Just as Grace once befriended Virginia, Virgina befriends Hester (Betsy Blair, with Michelangelo Antonioni in her future), a patient who doesn’t speak until Virginia is right about to leave and go home. Sisterhood; a relay of recovery. The final movement of this film, although hastily attached to the rest, is close to irresistible.

One of the film’s most remarkable aspects, a reflection of its agile back-and-forth between objective and subjective modes, is how funny the film is in observing the patients’ behaviors without once condescending or losing its sympathy and compassion. Many of the patients, including Virginia, use wit to cope with their predicament.

De Havilland should have won the Oscar. Well, no. She is vivid and moving; but hasn’t the role been made relatively easy by its division into action and voiceover, out of which she and Litvak were able to create dazzling point-counterpoint? I don’t see this as one of the greatest performances on earth. Indeed, it isn’t even one of the five “best actress” selections that I’ve made for 1948: Marlene Dietrich in Billy Wilder’s A Foreign Affair, Joan Fontaine in Max Ophüls’s Letter from an Unknown Woman, Barbara Stanwyck in Litvak’s Sorry, Wrong Number, Kinuyo Tanaka in Yasujiro Ozu’s A Hen in the Wind and, my choice of the year’s “best actress,” Anna Magnani in Roberto Rossellini’s L’amore. Stanwyck was one of the five Oscar nominees, and the winner, Jane Wyman in Jean Nugelesco’s Johnny Belinda, transcends a creaky melodrama to be at least as affecting as de Havilland’s Virginia. (The other Oscar nominees were Ingrid Bergman in Joan of Arc and Irene Dunne in I Remember Mama.) My own feeling is this: If she hadn’t turned down the role, Susan Hayward would have been shattering in it.

Besides, who would want to reside in a world where Olivia de Havilland had won three Oscars?!

* The single Oscar that The Snake Pit won was in the category of best sound recording.