Anatole Litvak
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Shutter Island (2010)
Directed by Martin Scorsese
influenced by The Snake Pit (1948)
Visuals Plot Themes
Artifice is part of the references that Scorsese makes to movies from the past -- e.g., Vertigo (1958), The Snake Pit (1948) -- but his use of artifice is more artificial than effective.
With the creepy and atmospheric “Shutter Island,” the 67-year-old Scorsese cuts a few new notches into his belt: not only is it an adaptation of a bestseller (by Dennis Lehane, who also wrote “Mystic River” and “Gone Baby Gone”), a first for the director, but it’s a mystery-laced-with-psychiatry film, in the vein of “Spellbound,” “The Snake Pit,” “Shock Corridor,” “The Green Mile” or even “The Silence of the Lambs.”
There have been a few like The Snake Pit and Bedlam.
You could say that Sucker Punch is a nymphet version of The Snake Pit or Shutter Island, or a live-action, green-screened redo of The Powerpuff Girls, or Black Swan (Carla Gugino has the demanding dance master role here) with a higher nightmare quotient, or an $82 million tribute to Jess Franco's sublimely cheesy women-in-prison movies of the '70s, or an Americanization of Norifumi Suzuki "pinky violence" melodramas (Girl Boss Guerrilla, Sex and Fury) of the same decade, or, in its backstory about a decent girl deprived of her inheritance and consigned to grow up in a prisonlike environment, a gloss on mid-19th-century classics from Jane Eyre to Little Dorrit.
A field day for schoolgirl fetishists and fanboys with a penchant for steampunk (but with Snyder's leaden dialogue, you've got to call it steamclunk), this staggering failure borrows from Baz Luhrmann's Moulin Rouge, Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet's The City of Lost Children, Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill, and a variety of psych-ward melodramas from The Snake Pit to The Uninvited.
This was Anastasia , the latest telling of the oft-told tale of a young woman posing as the long-lost Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna, youngest daughter of Tsar Nicholas II, the last imperial ruler of Russia (it was 20th Century's Fox's own second version of the story, though 1956's Anastasia has little to do with 1997's).
The source for the new Anastasia is the Oscar-winning 1956 Ingrid Bergman movie, about the youngest daughter of Czar Nicholas II, long rumored to have survived the execution of the Romanov family during the Russian revolution in 1917.
Buried (2010)
Directed by Rodrigo Cortés
influenced by Sorry, Wrong Number (1948), The Snake Pit (1948)
Plot Themes
Chris Sparling’s script takes place in 2006 (was it written then?), so perhaps he intended it as a pointed comment on the war—but it’s actually just a clever topical adaptation on the old Lucille Fletcher radio drama (and Barbara Stanwyck movie) Sorry, Wrong Number; Sparling even wraps things up with a variation on Fletcher’s classic last line.
It’s “Lady in a Cage’’ or “The Snake Pit ’’ for subscribers of Gentleman’s Quarterly, only the sets are a lot smaller and the acting less likely to shatter your speakers.
Kimi is a superb updating of Anatole Litvak's Sorry, Wrong Number , in which Barbara Stanwyck plays a bed-bound shut-in who accidentally overhears a murder plot on her party line.
Soderbergh handles the switching of gears with characteristic smoothness, even if the result is a movie composed of one part “ Thank You for Smoking ,” one part “ The Snake Pit ,” one part “ Spellbound ” and a dash of “ Basic Instinct ” for titillating good measure.
Memories of Murder (2003)
Directed by Bong Joon Ho
influenced by The Night of the Generals (1967)
Themes
The only antecedents that come to mind, in which the detectives serve a corrupt power and are blind to its injustices, but acknowledge a moral order and seek to apprehend or kill the pervert who violates it, would be "The Night of the Generals," about a police officer hunting a sex criminal in the Nazi general staff, and "In the Heat of the Night," where Rod Steiger is a bigoted lawman who must work with an African American detective played by Sidney Poitier to solve a crime.
Combining Sorry, Wrong Number's radio-drama appeal and Locke's claustrophobic tension, The Guilty might be the best film of this year's festival.
Director Andrew Niccol (who also adapted Meyer’s novel) dramatizes this by having Melanie speak telepathically to Wanderer, who in turn responds with spoken dialogue — which, for a while, gives “The Host” the strange tenor of a 1950s women’s psychodrama crossed with a 1980s body-switching comedy: “The Snake Pit” meets “All of Me.”
If Far From Heaven is in the style of technicolor “women’s pictures” like Douglas Sirk, Carol actually has the subtle feeling of some of the international films coming out and making an impression in the late ’50s and early ’60s like Goodbye Again (underrated), Breathless, or Jules and Jim—Slow, deliberately paced, with none of the performative melodrama.