Word: hollywoodized
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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...
...Theme. Mental illness is no novel subject for the movies. Hollywood has long since taken note of modern man's discovery, and worship, of the subconscious-that obscure force which has become more fashionable than God's or man's will as an explanation of all human acts. Various types of mental sickness (amnesia, etc.) have been used and used again as springboards for psychological thrillers. In fact, the theme has become so familiar that a relatively new visual idiom has been worn down into a bag of movie cliches (the close-up of the vague...
Here & there the picture shows glints of a typically slick Hollywood finish. It is more specious than convincing when it tries to get across the point that schizophrenia is something that "can happen to anybody." And Virginia's cure, once she 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...
Although she made her first movie 14 years ago, and has since done some skilled acting (Gone With the Wind, Hold Back the Dawn, To Each His Own-which won her the Academy Award in 1947), few people in or out of Hollywood know very much about Olivia de Havilland. "Livvie" has long been the subject of much amateur psychoanalysis among her friends and acquaintances...
Once upon a time people would step and look when 30 men began slicing each other with double-edged words. That was over 100 years age. But foggy morning duels went out with the Virginia Reel, and Hollywood has corned up the fine art of fencing; and nowadays few people pay much attention to Rene Peroy and his varsity swordsmen...