The woes of unbalanced people ended up as high class drama with a smidge of horror ("The Snake Pit") or more likely as thriller fodder (Hitchcock's "Spellbound")......cause nothing signified the entrance of a wacky person better than the electronic woo-wooing of a theramin....
But leave it to MGM, home of high gloss, to turn life in the loony bin into a grand romantic soap opera........where schemers, adulterers, and schizos do battle over......drapes.
Yes, you heard that right. The forward thinking shrink in charge (Richard Widmark) decides to sort of let the inmates run the asylum......and pick out new drapes for library.
This does not sit well with business manager Miss Inch (Lillian Gish) who's the J.Edgar Hoover of the place. She's been there forever, knows the skeletons in everybody's closet and protects her domain and influence with the fierceness of a medieval Baron in a walled fortress.......
The various docs fool around with the wrong women while the political tug of war over the drape selection further damages an already high strung patient (John Kerr) while he tentatively woos a sweet neurotic (Susan Strasberg)....
You may think this is the stuff of comedy, but MGM and director Vincente Minnelli aren't kidding here......it's a Cinemascope, Technicolor "Days Of Our Lives" with occupational therapy thrown in. And befitting a top of the line MGM production, the mental hospital looks like an Ivy League sorority house.........the only thing missing is Gene Kelly and Donald O'Connor dancing down the stairs.....
One of the BQ's great guilty pleasures, not to be missed.........we recommend a 2 hour check in to this sanitarium if you should run across it......3 therapeutic stars (***).......we can only sigh at how healthier all the characters would turn out if they'd just installed Venetian blinds in the library...
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