Word: snaking
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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...
...world no longer throws its mentally sick into snake pits, on the theory, once widely held, that an experience which might drive a sane person out of his mind might drive an insane one back into it. But snake pits still exist. The Shame of the States, a recently published, chillingly factual report on conditions in state mental hospitals (see MEDICINE), reveals horrors in the midst of the world's wealthiest, healthiest country which many Americans may refuse to believe. The large, hidden population of the mentally ill lives amid squalor, dirt and creeping fear, in the solitary confinement...
...publish a violently partisan attack on the conservationists (Vogt, Osborn et al.) . . . making light of the extinction of animal species, and referring to those who do not agree with the conservationists as "real scientists," as though some of the country's leading biologists and ecologists were snake-oil artists...
...hard the public is to please, or how hard-to-sell the picture, Hollywood knows that it can count on exhibitors. Last week, as if to keep in trim for tougher times ahead, theater managers were pushing movies with all the zeal, noise and logic of oldtime pitchmen hawking snake...
Throughout her London success, few critics considered Tallulah very seriously as an actress. But her looks were really something. Cecil Beaton called her "... A wicked archangel with . . . carven features . . . Her eyelashes, like a spreading peacock's tail, weigh down the lids over her enormous snake-like eyes . . . She is cadaverously thin ... the most easily recognizable face I know and ... the most luscious . . . cheeks like huge acid pink peonies . . . eyelashes built out with hot liquid paint to look like burnt matches . . . Her sullen, discontented, rather evil rosebud of a mouth is painted the brightest scarlet . . . shiny as ... strawberry...