Word: cunningham
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...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...
...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...
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...
...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...
...Bill Cunningham, of the Boston Herald succeeded in predicting the 20 to 7 score. Bob Cooke, of the New York Herald-Tribune, was the only other scribe to pick the two touchdown margin by which the Crimson downed the Blue...