Word: pit
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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...
That is the shocking theme of The Snake Pit...
...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...
...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...
When the great gold brocade curtains parted, the two audiences could see & hear for themselves that the Met hadn't really changed its ways. The opening storm music that the Met's best conductor, Fritz Busch, whipped out of his pit orchestra was only faintly furious. Tenor Vinay sang powerfully, and what top notes he couldn't sing he shouted. But Booth's burnoose could not disguise his lurching, hand-wringing acting. Like most Met stage lovers, he more often sang of his passion to Conductor Busch, at whom he stared fixedly, than to Desdemona...