Word: havilland
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Hollywood, certainly not the sanest community on earth, has managed to turn out an excellent movie about insanity. The Snake Pit (20th Century-Fox), starring Olivia de Havilland, is not a great work of cinematic art. It is, like the frightening scream from Miss de Havilland which rattles its sound track, an honest, accurate and dramatically powerful echo of certain ugly facts of modern life. It does what Hollywood has rarely done before: look harsh reality in the eye. Backed by enthusiastic reviews and smash box-office success in two big cities, The Snake Pit will be released next month...
...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...
...turns the corner, seems suspiciously quick, easy and well-timed for a happy ending (in reality, she might very likely suffer a relapse). But with all its minor faults, The Snake Pit is an important motion picture. One of its notable achievements is that it establishes Olivia de Havilland not so much as a star, a dubious title she already held, but as an actress...
Last week Test Pilot John Derry was flying De Havilland's experimental DH-108 at 40,000 feet over southern England. The weather was clear, the "machometer" (speed indicator in fractions of the speed of sound) showed Mach .86. Derry felt just right, so he opened the throttle and turned the nose down...
...tips (see cut). This design may account for the fact that Pilot Derry felt none of the "compressibility" effects when flying in the transsonic speed range. But the DH-108 may have other improvements that are secret. A similar plane came apart in the air and killed Geoffrey de Havilland...