The Snake Pit **** (1948, Olivia de Havilland, Leo Genn, Mark Stevens, Celeste Holm, Glenn Langan, Leif Erickson, Beulah Bondi. Lee Patrick) – Classic Movie Review 4178

Director Anatole Litvak’s brutal and gruelling 1948 20th Century Fox American psychological drama film The Snake Pit features a blistering Oscar-nominated Best Actress performance from Olivia de Havilland that shines through this tale of a woman committed to an asylum who leaves before she is cured and is returned in a more dangerously disturbed state.

De Havilland plays Virginia Stuart, who descends into paranoia soon after marriage to the handsome Robert Cunningham (Mark Stevens). The movie had six Oscar nominations, but won only for Best Sound, Recording (Thomas T Moulton).

Three years after Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound, Litvak’s ground-breaking film takes a more sombre and serious look at mental breakdown – though it suggests shock treatment as a valid cure – effectively mixing documentary-style naturalism and forthright melodrama.

De Havilland won the 1948 New York Critics’ Best Actress award unanimously and the Best Actress award at the Venice Film Festival 1949.

Though it had an A certificate in Britain, it carried a special proviso that no one under 16 was to be admitted to the cinema, making it a forerunner of the X certificate.

Also in the cast are Leo Genn, Celeste Holm, Glenn Langan, Leif Erickson, Beulah Bondi, Lee Patrick, Natalie Schafer, Helen Craig, Ann Doran, Betsy Blair, Minna Gombel, Frank Conroy and Ruth Donnelly.

In ancient times, the mentally ill were thrown into a pit of snakes, with the idea that it would make a normal person insane, therefore it would make a mad person sane.

De Havilland won the role when original choice Gene Tierney became pregnant.

The British censor insisted on adding a foreword explaining that everyone on screen was a paid actor and that conditions in British hospitals were unlike those portrayed in the film. The censor also cut 1,000 feet of the film, deleting all sequences involving patients in straitjackets and lighter scenes evoking laughter.

It was nominated for Best Actress, Best Director, Best Music, Scoring of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture, Best Picture and Best Writing, Screenplay.

Olivia de Havilland went on to win her second Oscar for Best Actress the following year for The Heiress. She previously won for To Each His Own (1946). She was 100 on 1 July 2016. She retired for many decades in Paris, where she died on 26 July 2020, aged 104.

She was an Oscar nominee for Gone with the Wind (1939), Hold Back the Dawn (1941) and The Snake Pit (1948) and a winner for To Each His Own (1946) and The Heiress.(1949). With Hold Back the Dawn (1941), she lost to her own sister Joan Fontaine for her role in Suspicion (1941).

Litvak hired Arthur Laurents to rewrite the screenplay by Frank Partos and Millen Brand, who later insisted the bulk of the shooting script was theirs, and the Writers Guild of America denied him screen credit. Brand later confessed that he and Partos had copied scenes written by Laurents and apologised for the deception. Four decades later, Laurents learned he was ineligible for WGA health benefits because he was short by one credit to qualify, the one he failed to get for The Snake Pit.

However, 20th Century Fox executives liked Laurents’s work and Alfred Hitchcock hired him for Rope.

© Derek Winnert 2016 Classic Movie Review 4178

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