The Snake Pit (1948)
Directed by Anatole Litvak
Virginia Cunningham is confused upon finding herself in a mental hospital, with no memory of her arrival at the institution. Tormented by delusions and unable to even recognize her husband, Robert, she is treated by Dr. Mark Kik, who is determined to get to the root of her mental illness. As her treatment progresses, flashbacks depict events in Virginia's life that may have contributed to her instability.
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What critics compared The Snake Pit to
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.
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.
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.
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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.”