The Snake Pit

In my post on movies and madness, I linked "Snake Pit" with "Bedlam," the cheesy Boris Karloff thriller. After watching Anatole Litvak's "Snake Pit" on video and doing some research, I realize now that I couldn't have been more unfair to the professionals who worked on this groundbreaking 1948 film. This addendum should help to dispel any false impressions I gave, as well as reporting on some fascinating intersections between the Hollywood left and Freudianism.

Anatole Litvak, whom Paul Buhle describes as an "independent-minded leftish émigré" in his recently published (with Dave Wagner) "Radical Hollywood", worked as a teenager in the avant-garde Soviet theater in Petrograd. Although he left the USSR for Germany in 1925, Litvak continued to gravitate toward the cultural left. He was the film editor for G. W. Pabst's 1925 "The Joyless Street." (Although Pabst collaborated with Brecht and Weill, and fled Germany in the 1930s' for Paris, he eventually returned to Austria, where he directed some forgettable films for the Hitler regime.)

After arriving in Hollywood in the 1930s, Litvak directed a number of socially aware film-noirs, relying on the talents of Communist screenwriter John Wexley on numerous occasions. Film-noir had a powerful attraction for radicals like Litvak and Wexley. It allowed them to express the dark side of bourgeois society using a kind of naturalism that empathized with the outcasts who had nothing to lose. While bosses and politicians almost came off as scum in these films, you are not likely to find pat formulas for socialism. Litvak and Wexley joint projects included the 1938 "City For Conquest," starring James Cagney as a boxer blinded by acid in the ring seeking revenge and the 1939 "Confessions of a Nazi Spy" that exposed the German-American bund.

They also worked together on the 1947 "The Long Night," which stands alone as a marriage between film-noir and social commentary. Based on "Le Jour se Léve", a film directed by Marcel Carné and written by noted poet Jacque Prévert anticipating Vichy France, "The Long Night" also would seem to anticipate our own version of Vichy called McCarthyism. Starring Henry Fonda as a WWII vet and Ohio steelworker, the opening scene depicts vets and their families enraged at what Buhle and Wagner call "their own social dispossession following so much personal sacrifice."

The 1948 "Snake Pit" clearly follows in this tradition. It is a social protest film that was intended to raise awareness about the mistreatment of mental patients. It also carefully followed film-noir conventions, with one important exception. Instead of being trapped in a web cast by society, this time the lead character is snared by a web of her own making: schizophrenia.

The screenplay for "Snake Pit," co-written by Frank Partos and Millen Brand, was based on Mary Jane Ward's semi-autobiographical account of an intelligent woman, who like Joanne Greenberg's "I Never Promised You a Rose Garden", succumbs to mental illness and finds herself in a hellish institution.

It starred Olivia De Havilland as Virginia Cunningham, who suffers a mental breakdown shortly after her marriage. Until this first promising connection with another human being, she had drifted aimlessly from city to city, living in the sort of drab hotels looking out onto neon signs that were commonplace in film-noir. Instead of running from the cops, she was running from herself.

The hospital in "Snake Pit" is overcrowded and staffed by attendants and nurses who treat their patients like cattle. No doubt, the images of shuffling, delusional patients must have reverberated with the makers of latter films such as "I Never Promised You a Rose Garden" or "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest". Unable to cope with a surplus patient population, the hospital releases patients whether they are ready for the outside world or not. In the late 1940s, there were no anti-psychotic drugs to ease the transition.

When Cunningham is brought before a review board to find out whether she is ready to be returned to her husband, she breaks down before them. She endures straitjacket, shock treatment, solitary confinement and the "snake pit", a ward straight out of 18th-century Bedlam. In the final moments of the film, after she has been treated successfully by psychotherapy, she is heard reflecting on the barbaric treatments meted out to the ill. Once, she says, they put sane people in snake pits to make them crazy. Then they decided to put sick people in snake pits in order to shock them into sanity.

The kindly, pipe-smoking Dr Kik (Leo Genn), who has a portrait of Sigmund Freud on his wall, administers her psychotherapy. After learning through her sessions with him that her sickness amounts to what the Freudians call an Elektra complex, Virginia Cunningham regains her sanity. Her delusions were expression of jealousy over a new sibling, and feelings that her father loved her mother more than her. Of course, since the Oedipal and Elektra complexes are nearly universal according to the Freudians, one is at a loss to understand why schizophrenia is not universal as well.

By 1948, Freudianism had become well entrenched in American society. Although it presumably sought nothing more than the integration of the neurotic or the psychotic into bourgeois society, it also won adherents on the socialist left who tended to see Freud and Marx as kindred spirits. As Marx explained political and economic repression and how to overcome it, Freud would do likewise for sexual repression.

There were many factors in this historical conjuncture that militated for the rise of Freudian orthodoxy. To begin with, many of the prime exponents of the discipline were refugees from Nazi Germany. Since Hitler had made Freudians persona non grata, it was automatically assumed that they stood for civilized values against Nazi barbarism. Some, like Bruno Bettleheim, had been interned in concentration camps. Bettleheim, who was sadistic to patients and colleagues alike, used the concentration camp as an analogy for unhealthy families. "Bad" mothering was akin to the treatment Jews received at the hands of the SS.

To further complicate any possible critique of Freudianism from the standpoint of organic medicine and science, there was a tendency to oppose any genetic explanations as being inspired by Nazism. Since Freudianism came down heavily on the "nurture" side of the nature-nurture divide, any attempt to look at nature was seen as retrograde.

Now for a final word on Millen Brand, one of the two screenwriters of "Snake Pit". Although I could not unearth any documentation on his ties to the left, one must assume that he was fairly typical of the popular front cultural world. Like many of this generation, from the Hollywood 10 to less well-known cultural figures, they never forsook their belief in a more civilized world.

At the age of 71, Millen Brand took part in the 1977 annual Peace March in Japan. Along with hundreds of Japanese and American peace activists, including well-known civil rights activist Jim Peck, marched for a month.

On December 7th, 1980, the New York Times report on Brand's trip to Japan included the following:

Mr. Brand, whose best-known novel, ''The Outward Room'' (1937) was the first of a genre to document psychological breakdown and recovery, is sensitive to the ''continual torment'' of the survivors he talks with along the way. He comes to understand that radiation is ''the one all-important difference'' that marks the A-bomb from conventional ones; that once exposed to it, one lives with the terror that its ''unpredictable presence, the glow/ in the cells like an unending ember,'' will erupt into cancers of every kind. ''How can sanity/ and this bomb exist together?'' he asks.

It is, of course, this kind of engagement with the problems of madness and sanity that drew Millen Brand to a project like "Snake Pit". It is also the same kind of engagement that Marxists identify with completely.