Word: pit
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...minds have become a favorite study of Hollywood dramas, but the psychological twist has generally been used as modern gloss to the standard boy-meets-girl glamor. In even the best of these, the deranged mind was merely held up as an interesting object to look at. "The Snake Pit," however, void of all hints of Hollywood glamor, achieves the startling effect of entering the diseased mind and reflecting its horrors and fears--its despair in groping in darkness for a ray of light. The mind is not exhibited but analyzed; the audience not merely understands it but feels...
...appears briefly as a completely mad girl who tries to choke all who come near her, and is only comforted by the heroine. Her powerful portrayal of the pitiful figure leaves a strong impression, for she does not recover and is left in darkness at the bottom of the pit...
...mentally sick. An ignorant doctor and a power-loving nurse each causes relapses when the patient is almost recovered. Her cure is the work of one doctor who takes special interest in the case. Without this doctor, she would be one more at the bottom of the pit...
...Hollywood exaggeration or unreal emotion, although it strains at one touch of sentimentality when the inmates tearfully sing "Going Home" at an asylum dance. Except for this minor defect, the film's purity aids it in revealing the dark horrors of mental disease at the bottom of a snake pit...
...Snake Pit. Olivia de Havilland is pulled back from schizophrenia in a movingly realistic story (TIME...