3 Strong Anti-Heroines of 1950 Film Noir: Life’s Rough “You see kid, in this cage, you get tough or you get killed. Better wise up before it’s too late!”

Life’s Rough: Three Strong Anti-Heroines of 1950 Film Noir

“You see kid, in this cage, you get tough or you get killed. Better wise up before it’s too late!”Kitty Stark, Caged (1950)

The 1950 film, Caged!, The Damned Don’t Cry, and The File on Thelma Jordon, contain three women performing female masculinity. A common thread these characters possess is ‘metamorphosis.’ They are forged by male institutions and they must adapt to survive. Each woman is thrust into a noir narrative.

In Caged!, Eleanor Parker leaves innocence outside the prison bars and is transformed into a hardened, jaded criminal in order to survive. Joan Crawford, a poverty-stricken mother in The Damned Don’t Cry rises as a high-powered opulent underworld mistress to prevail and support herself. Barbara Stanwyck is predatory, manipulating a weak man to gain access to her Aunt’s fortune in The File on Thelma Jordon — Stanwyck ultimately becomes a fallen figure of remorse and redemption.

Like their noir male counterparts, they become anti-heroines as past actions come back to haunt them.

Film noir of 1950 desired realism, decadence, and transformation. Femme-fatales thrive using sexuality to claim independence from weak, damaged, sexually-obsessed men, unable to resist dangerous influences. These women master patriarchal organizations, taking control of their bodies and identities to avoid gender enslavement in a male hetero-driven society.

In most noir films men are the central figures–isolated from their surroundings, closed in by circumstances beyond control, but married to fatalistic visions with stoic passivity. By flipping this trope on its battered head, these women invoke female masculinity driving their characters. As anti-heroines, they adopt masculine armor to navigate masculine institutions. They’re placed in situations that impose a definition of what a woman is and should be. They adopt feminine masculinity to survive.

“Female masculinity is framed as the rejected scraps of dominate masculinity in order that male masculinity may appear to be the real thing… Masculinity in this society inevitably conjures up notions of power and legitimacy and privilege; it often symbolically refers to the power of the state and to uneven distributions of wealth.” — Halberstam, Female Masculinity

Caged! (1950)

You don’t know women until you know them without men!

Directed by John Cromwell, Caged! is set in a women’s prison and plays out like a savage dance with “unremitting pessimism” (Crowther) with the women performing masculinity to gain power. It is a “Dames in the Hoosegow” film (New York Herald Tribune), indicative of socially conscious 1950s noir. The women are demeaned in prison, and to prevail they appropriate masculine primacy.

Caged! boasts an incredible ensemble. Eleanor Parker’s persuasive performance as Marie Allen, a delicate young woman subjected to cruelty by the sadistic degenerate Matron Evelyn Harper (punctuated to the hilt by imposing 6’ 2” Hope Emerson).

Wonderful character actors include Betty Garde as Kitty Stark, Ellen Corby as Emma Barber, Jan Sterling as Jeta Kovsky (aka Smoochie who loves to kite checks, buys pretty shiny things, and can’t stay out of prison), Olive Deering as June Roberts, Gertrude Michael as Georgia, and Lee Patrick as ‘vice queen’ Elvira Powell.

American actress Eleanor Parker acting in the film ‘Caged’. USA, 1950 (Photo by Mondadori Portfolio via Getty Images)

The film opens with the police van door swinging open —“Pile out, you tramps. This is the end of the line”— to reveal the ‘new fish’ in the fatalistic incarceration cycle. The central figure is a timid, pregnant, and nervous 19-year-old Marie who gets the book thrown at her for helping her husband commit armed robbery- “For that forty bucks I heisted I certainly got myself an education.” Her role as an accomplice, sitting in the car waiting for the bum, lands her 15 years in prison. With a doe-eyed shocked gaze, she is thrown into a primal world. The intake nurse’s examination reveals she is ‘expecting company’ — with her dead husband’s child. Marie, number 93859, is sweet candy for the cold-blooded, menacing Matron Harper.

Marie doesn’t fall for Harper’s charms, thus she is subjected to dehumanizing torture by Harper, the bon-bon-eating, romance novel-reading dyke who enjoys personal comforts and flaunts luxuries (as a grotesque phony femme) to the women prisoners who don’t have any privileges.

Harper brutally beats Marie causing her to lose her baby, thus her motherhood is taken away.

Removing her femininity, and her identity, Harper shaves Marie’s hair. When vice queen Elvira distributes lipsticks at Christmas, Harper cruelly takes them away. Harper, embedded in the masculine system, creates an environment where the weakest women must become predatory cons, shedding their femininity.

Sympathetic warden Ruth Benton (Agnes Moorhead) allows them to keep cosmetics as a connection to the outside world. Believing in rehabilitation, Benton bucks bureaucracy, but her altruism blinds her from the vicious brutality.

The mood at the prison heats up and Kitty kills Matron Harper. Marie is worn down by the inhumanity of prison life and disillusioned by Harper’s corrupting influence over inmates. She changes from a shivering innocent to a smart-mouthed hard-bitten con. Her efforts to go straight are sabotaged by the sadistic Harper. Marie learns the hard way how to earn parole, but she’s already stigmatized and changed by the system.

Jan Sterling, Ellen Corby, Marjorie Crossland, Olive Deering, Betty Garde, and Eleanor Parker in Caged (1950).

Through Marie’s eyes, we experience dehumanization and objectification, from the moment she is processed, to her release. Influenced by other miscreants and malcontents Marie evolves into a criminal by the system constructed to rehabilitate. She sheds her victimhood and takes on a powerful masculine approach, but not with the ruthlessness of a femme fatale. Marie becomes a criminal. She’s independent, as only a man could be in 1950.

When released at the gates, she gets into a fancy sedan with shady characters. She’s become a prostitute for her butch mentor Elvira who has given up on men completely. “If you stay in here too long, you don’t think about guys at all. You just get out of the habit.” –Elvira

Warden Benton keeps Marie’s file open as she watches out the window “Keep it active, She’ll be back” summarizing the Sisyphean absurdity of prison, hardening and transforming women without any hope.

THE DAMNED DON’T CRY (1950)

“Call me CHEAP?” Nothing’s Cheap When You Pay the Price She’s Paying!

Directed by Vincent Sherman, with a screenplay by Harold Medford and Jerome Weidman. Cinematography by Ted D. McCord  (The Treasure of the Sierra Madres 1948, Johnny Belinda 1948, I Died a Thousand Times 1955, The Sound of Music 1965) (wardrobe Sheila O’Brien who worked on all of Joan’s pictures, Sudden Fear 1952, Flamingo Road 1945, Female on the Beach 1955)

Stars Joan Crawford as Ethel Whitehead, David Brian as George Castleman, Steve Cochran as Nick Prenta, Kent Smith as Martin Blackford, Hugh Sanders as Grady, Selena Royle as Patricia Longworth, Jacqueline deWitt as Sandra, Morris Ankrum as Jim Whitehead, Edith Evanson as Mrs. Castleman, Richard Egan as Roy.

Joan Crawford is Ethel Whitehead/Lorna Hansen Forbes, a woman from harrowing poverty, who leaves her husband, Roy, after their son Tommy is tragically killed. She starts over in New York City first as a cigar store clerk and model for a cheap fashion wholesaler. She eventually climbs to the top of the high society/criminal underworld wearing a facade of respectability. While usually men abandon families, Ethel is the one to leave. Crawford perfectly performs the role of power and masculinity.

The Damned Don’t Cry portrays a bleak, dark, corrupt world. The story is told in flashbacks. Directed by Vincent Sherman (All Through the Night 1942, Mr. Skeffington 1944, Nora Prentiss 1947, Affair in Trinidad 1952, The Garment Jungle 1957) The film co-stars Steve Cochran as Nick Prenta, David Brian as George Castleman, and Kent Smith as Martin Blackford, and Jacqueline de Wit as Sandra.

Ethel begins as an unsophisticated modest woman, married to an oil field worker, dirt poor, plain looking, and beaten down. An oppressed housewife and mother, judged harshly by her misogynist father, and husband Roy who says “You’ll never do enough for her.” She becomes an elegant ambitious society climber who dismisses suggestions her life is corrupt and immoral. Crawford manifests her signature cunning in the ferocious pragmatic transformation.

Ethel lives with her parents and beloved son Tommy, who wants a bicycle but Roy says it’s too much money. Wanting her son to be happy, she makes a down payment on the bike. Furious, Roy demands it is returned. On his way to the store, Tommy rides down the road and is hit by a truck, and killed. His death ends their marriage, and Ethel leaves.

Roy says he’s “done the best he could.” Ethel answers “Well it ain’t good enough.”

Unlike male protagonists with more choices, in this narrative, Ethel can only be a model or prostitute.  She performs female masculinity by adopting independence. Ethel creates the power to choose her own fate, possessing what Hirsch calls ‘a lonely man’ trope.

Another model, Sandra, introduces Ethel to a new world, convincing her to go out with wealthy businessmen. She becomes the glamorous mistress of gangster George Castleman, showered with riches— fur coats, diamonds, and haute couture. George helps Ethel’s metamorphosis into a wealthy socialite, Lorna Hansen Forbes, and she enters the inner circle of gangsters.

Ethel now known as Lorna, exploits her beauty, relying on rich men to pay for the privilege of her company. She learns she must selfishly grab for herself. Negotiating her body for wealth is a means to an end. Lorna’s selfishness emerges.

Lorna surpasses Sandra’s petty schemes to aim for the brass ring of ultimate luxury.

She befriends mild-mannered Martin Blackford, an account who falls for her. Encouraging him to become Castleman’s bookkeeper, she uses him to get ahead. Martin brings a dark brooding presence into Lorna’s life which is visually actualized in a scene where Lorna is sunning herself at the pool, Blackford casts a symbolic dark cloud over her light-hearted sexually carefree embodiment. The closeup shows Ethel’s face as the sun’s rays emblematically reflect in her sunglasses. Taking them off, she turns off the sunlight and is confronted with Blackford’s bitterness.

The jaded Lorna tells the neutered Martin “You’re a nice guy, but the world isn’t for nice guys. You gotta kick and punch and belt your way up cuz nobody’s going to give you a life. You’ve got to do it yourself. Cuz nobody cares about us except ourselves… It’s that stuff you take to the bank, that filthy buck that everybody sneers at but slugs to get.” Martin is afraid he’ll lose self-respect. “Don’t tell me about self-respect!” Ethel snaps. “That’s what you tell yourself when you got nothing else!”

Her glamorous life ultimately comes at a price. Castleman wants to use Lorna to spy on Nick Prenta, as he suspects Prenta of killing one of his men Grady (Hugh Sanders), and making it look like a car accident by planting a bottle of alcohol at the scene. Castleman fears Nick Prenta is organizing the men against him. He sends Lorna to insinuate herself with Nick Prenta in order to find out what he is up to and report back to him. Setting him up for a hit. Instead, Lorna starts falling in love with the handsome rogue gangster who has a reputation for his womanizing. Lorna winds up defying Castleman by not staying in touch and actually falling for the guy instead.

Martin then shows up telling Lorna, (though he still refers to her as Ethel out of spite) that George Castleman has sent him to check up on her, he hasn’t heard from her in a while. The moment we see Martin’s scruples have eroded is during the pool scene which illustrates Martin’s own transformation from a nice decent guy to one of George’s thugs, with his smug tone and his dark sunglasses. He warns Lorna not to hold out on George. He boasts about how powerful he’s become and that people listen to him. He offers her some ‘sound advice’ “Has he promised you the world too!?”  referring to Nick Prenta and sneaking in a good dig at how she used him at one time. “He means nothing to me, except he’s a human being.”Don’t tell me that disturbs you.” Martin has become so jaded and embittered.

Later Nick Prenta asks Lorna to marry him, she is moved to tears as she embraces him. Lorna asks, “Do I really mean that much to you?” Nick tells her, “Everything, why is that enough?” Lorna –“Then get out of this, Nick, I’m scared about what you’re doing, what you’re planning, what it will lead to, if you don’t give this up.” “If that’s what it takes to get you, you’ve got a deal. I can get out of this inside a year” “No, it’ll be too late then” “But I can’t get out now Lorna, this is a big jump I’ve got to see it through.”

Lorna begs him to give it all up, but he kisses and sends her back to her hotel room where she finds Martin and Castleman waiting for her. Castelman is sitting in the dark, giving off a sense of menace from the shadows. “Hello Lorna” he puffs on his cigar then rises from the couch. “Aren’t you glad to see me?” Suddenly he begins grilling her about Nick Prenta’s meeting, but she tells him that she doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Castleman tightens his fist and smacks Lorna across the face, his paranoia about the meeting and his gang aided by Prenta out to get him is driving him into a frenzy.

In his fury, even Martin gets worried about Castleman’s sudden violent outburst. Then he hits Martin and knocks him down, and begins beating Lorna brutally as she tries to convince him that she’s not in love with Nick Prenta, it’s just that she doesn’t want anyone to get hurt. She tells Castleman that she’s still in love with him.  But he growls at her, “You’re lying, you’re so used to lying and cheating and double-crossing that you almost make it seem good.”

Castleman throws Lorna into the glass window that shatters. Martin tries to defend her, and calm Castleman down, telling him it’s enough. Castleman says “She’s no good, not even to you” yet Martin thinks fast on his feet, “But she is to you, she can still help, she can still be useful.” Castleman tells Martin looking down at the battered Lorna,  “There’s only one thing to do with dirt, sweep it up.” Martin tells him, “Listen to me, you want Nick don’t you? She can get him” Castleman responds, “You got a brain Marty, best kind, the kind you don’t get to go out and buy.”  As Castleman says this he looks disdainfully at poor Lorna lying in a pile of broken glass all bruised and sobbing.

Martin convinces Lorna to call Nick Prenta and get him over to the hotel room. Prenta shows up already knowing her true identity, he must have heard it from Eddie Hart. She is lost in shadow, beaten down and crying, Prenta sarcastically tells Lorna, “I want to apologize for busting in on you like this Mrs. Forbes, but a friend of yours, Eddie Hart said it would be okay, he said Castleman might not like it, but Ethel Whitehead would go for anything.”  But when he sees how badly beaten Lorna is he comes to her side, until he is confronted by Castleman, who emerges out of the shadows and tells him that while Prenta likes to be in the headlines he’s gonna move him over to the obituary column. Prenta turns to Lorna, “You dirty tramp!”

A fight breaks out and Castleman shoots and kills Prenta. In the turmoil, Lorna takes off in her car. Castleman tells Martin that they’ll have to dispose of Prenta first and then “I want her.”

Once Lorna fails to stop Castleman she is transformed once again through resignation and redemption having gone full circle through her own journey of hell.

Martin tries to protect Lorna from Castleman, by telling the police that it was George Castleman who killed Nick Prenta. In the meantime, Castleman wants her dead. And he knows the truth about where Lorna comes from, where she was probably heading and he’s on his way there.

Lorna now home in Bakersfield, arrives at the broken shack with her fur coat and her Ray Foreman coif. Her parents first reject her. The bitter Martin has shed his anger by now, hopelessly in love with Lorna, and he shows up to try and protect her from the vicious Castleman. In the film’s ironic rhythm of fate, she symbolically comes full circle, winding up on the same road where her son died.

Martin tells her that she needs to move on and keep running before Castleman catches up with her, but she’s worried that he’s unfinished business now too since he’s turned on Castleman. He reminds her “We do what we do– what was it you once said?, because we can’t help ourselves.” 

Castleman shows up at Lorna’s home. She quietly walks out of the house, so as not to endanger her mother and father and Martin who are talking in the kitchen.

In the brutal climax Lorna calmly, stoically and courageously confronts the vicious George Castleman.

He asks for Martin but Lorna lies and covers up for him, saying she hasn’t seen him. She boldly with new resolve walks right up to George Castleman. He asks if she’s been waiting for him. “Strangely enough George there was a time when I did wait for you. And no one else. but that’s over now.”

In a struggle to take the gun away from Castleman, Lorna gets shot and wounded, lying in the dirt wearing her fur coat, –hows that for symbolism! Then Martin comes out of the house and shoots Castleman down and his getaway car leaves without him, while he’s lying there dead.

The police and the press show up pushing for all the answers to Lorna’s (Ethel’s) involvement.

Two cops outside the house start talking about the case. Cop one-“Pretty tough living in a place like this” Cop two”Tougher to get out” Cop one“Wouldn’t you?”  Cop two shakes his head “Yes!”

Having traveled through her journey performing the code of female masculinity she has reclaimed herself, found her empowerment, and emerged as her own woman again. We are left wondering what the future holds for Lorna/Ethel, now not only emancipated, if not redeemed, as the anti-heroine of The Damned Don’t Cry!

THE FILE ON THELMA JORDON (1950)

Thelma Jordon: “I’m no good for any man for any longer than a kiss!”

Directed by Robert Siodmak, written by Marty Holland with a screenplay by Ketti Frings. Cinematography by George Barnes (Rebecca 1940, Jane Eyre 1943, Spellbound 1945, Mourning Becomes Electra 1947, Force of Evil 1948, War of the Worlds 1953) Costumes designed by Edith head

Starring Barbara Stanwyck as Thelma Jordon, Wendell Corey as Cleve Marshall, Paul Kelly as Miles Scott, Joan Tetzel as Pamela Blackwell Marshall, and Stanley Ridges as Kingsly Willes.

Barbara Stanwyck plays Thelma Jordon who uses a gullible attorney to cover up her crimes of murder and larceny, secretly in cahoots with her sleazy husband. As in Double Indemnity, Stanwyck masterfully plays a ‘vice-ridden murderess.’ She performs female masculinity, playing the aggressor— pursuing lovers, greed, and power.

Directed by Robert Siodmak, the film opens with Thelma in a small-town district attorney’s office reporting burglary attempts at the mansion she shares with her aunt. She begins an affair with DA Cleve Marshall (Wendell Corey), who is in a loveless marriage. Thelma is also married to the sinister Tony Laredo. An icy femme fatale who desires danger, she’s drawn to Tony’s equally nefarious nature and devours Cleve who is weakened by her magnetism. Thelma starts out the femme fatale, her fatal flaw is falling in love with Cleve, feeling remorse, and sacrificing herself to become redeemed in the end.

Thelma’s aunt is murdered in an apparent robbery and her emerald necklace is missing. Fearing Tony will be implicated, she cleans up the evidence and calls Cleve to help. Thelma is cold and calculating, casting Cleve as her lover and accomplice known only as Mr. X. Cleve tells her to shut the lights and pretend she was asleep when the police arrive. Cleve leaves, making sure to be seen but unrecognized by the butler who discovers Aunt Vera’s body.

When Tony’s alibi checks out, Thelma is arrested for murder. While the police try unsuccessfully to prove her guilt, she and Tony plan to leave town. By now Cleve has uncovered Thelma’s checkered past.

He accuses her of duplicity and Thelma admits he was part of the plot. When Cleve confronts her, Tony’s dark presence looms. The camera shows both men juxtaposed in the room, Tony’s dark presence looms— he is too irresistible to let go. Cleve is too normal and unselfish to be stimulating for her deviant desires. With both men framed in contrast, Thelma realizes she belongs with the dark and dangerous Tony. Tony beats Cleve to a pulp, leaving with Thelma.

But driving down a winding mountain road, Thelma’s pang of conscience gets the better of her, and she causes the car to plunge off the cliff. It’s a darkly romantic gesture, suicide by a flaming car crash is her attempt at redemption. She hopes with her death, Cleve can repair the ruination of his life. But this is noir, and he cannot wake from the nightmare.

Tony dies but Thelma lives long enough to confess her crimes. She does not give away Cleve as Mr. X, but Miles (Paul Kelly) is suspicious. His career in shambles, Cleve walks off into the uncertain shadows of noir. Thelma dies, redeemed. It’s noir universal justice, Thelma cannot get away with her Aunt’s murder and continue her affair. She must be brought down by fate’s hand.

Miles: ”She’s confessed everything except who her Mr. X is.”

Cleve looks at her “Why don’t you tell him?”

Thelma: “I love him, that’s why. I couldn’t go on with him Cleve. You did that for me. I’m glad I told. All my life struggling, the good and the bad.”

Cleve: “Save your strength darling.”

Thelma: ”Willis said I was two people, he was right. You don’t supposed they could just let half of me die?”

This is your EverLovin’ Joey saying, it’s great to spend time in the darkness of noir’s shadows & under the influence of fate’s pointed finger, but you gotta come out into the light til the next time around!

Happy NoirVember!, Joey

Lauren Bacall: Shock Treatment (1964) Dr. Edwina Beighley the female Caligari or it’s just like working with animals in a zoo!

lauren-bacall-blogathon

This post is in participation with The Lauren Bacall Blogathon hosted by In The Good Old Days of Classic Hollywood.

The winsome & sultry Lauren Bacall steps out of character as a screen legend, noir goddess & trend-setting icon…

bacall

To Have and Have Not (1944), The Big Sleep (1946), Key Largo (1948) Dark Passage (1947) Young Man with A Horn (1950) Designing Women (1957) and so much more!

Lauren and Roddy in Shock Treatment

… And embarks on a role as the icy cold psychologist/Animal Behavioral Researcher, and a Praying Mantis that Dr. Edwina Beighley (pronounced Bailey) She’s a female Caligari who has experimented with her dangerous drug on animals as her subjects in Africa, conducting unorthodox experiments now on human subjects, in Shock Treatment (1964)

Edwina with colleagues

She’s always griping in her condescending highfalutin way- at the hospital board members that she can’t continue her (exploitative and nefarious) research the way she’d like, driven by her mission she craves money. Using mental patients now, not tigers, to continue her scientific analysis of how certain drugs effect the criminal mind and the resulting catatonia that follows.

Shoc Treatment poster

A seedy psychological thriller with oddballs and opportunists and one hell of a great cast, wasted?… Maybe, but deliciously fun to watch anyways! The film has its moments and if you’re like me and love a great jaunt into the exploitative- then indulge yourself!

Films like The Snake Pit, Lilith, David and Lisa, ( Bacall was also in a film about an exclusive psychiatric clinic- The Cobweb 1955, and earlier in 1950 she embodied the conflicted Amy North who struggled and studied to become a psychiatrist in Young Man with a Horn)…

Bacall-Young-Man-With-a-Horn.ms.081214

… show reversibility of a plot narrative that usually exists in other film genres. The role is interchangeable with the sane and the mad. the outside or insider, which suggests that there is no good outcome or moreover, no clear solution to the film’s ‘problem’ and that the film’s world is veritably unstable with Dr. Edwina Beighley at the center of the disorder!

Cinematographer Sam Leavitt (Anatomy of a Murder 1959, The Defiant Ones 1958) weaves in noirish shadowscapes & creates odd frames where one of the main characters will be relegated to the extreme edge while it allows the camera to focus all its power on the other of the central or peripheral actors/characters, creating the appearance of an off-balanced conversation, that perpetuates the ‘offness’ of the story and its atmosphere…

Dale nighttime in bed noir

CapturFiles_37

Shock Treatment (1964) Directed by Denis Sanders Shown standing, from left: Roddy McDowall, Ossie Davis; seated: Stuart Whitman

In a similar vein but far superior social commentary as Sam Fuller’s Shock Corridor 1963, it’s a story of an actor Dale Nelson (Stuart Whitman) willing to fake insanity and take money to infiltrate a mental hospital in order to get close to a homicidal maniac Martin Ashley (Roddy McDowall) who claims to have burned to cinders, the millions, he has hidden of his victim’s fortune, now buried somewhere on her estate.

The Intriguing Everyman: Cult Star Stuart Whitman

ECT

“The most dramatic expression of psychiatry as a mechanism of enforcing conformity is seen in the film depictions of ECT (electroconvulsive therapy) or commonly known as electroshock Treatment

in the 1960s and 70s ECT was recast in movie theaters as a torturous, barbaric, medieval practice in which individualistic mental patients were literally shocked into conformity. Vivid depictions of electroshock were depicted in films such as Samuel Fuller’s Shock Corridor 1963 and Shock Treatment 1964.”

— Psycho Thrillers: Cinematic explorations of the mysteries of the mind by William Indick.

Shock Treatment Whitman's Shock

In fact, anti-conformity is Dale’s method of breaking into the hospital system by railing against conformity in the guise of intellectually and physically disturbing the social order. He smashes the window fronts of a department store.

During Martin Ashley’s (Roddy McDowall) trial for killing and beheading his employer, Dr. Edwina Beighley is the defense’s go-to specialist on mental illness and key witness, their sympathetic psychiatrist who manipulates the court into allowing her to observe him at her State Psychopathic hospital for observation.

Edwina close up trial

Martin at trial

Edwina on the stand trial

On the stand Edwina- “I’m a fellow of the American Psychiatric Society..and the author of two textbooks now in use.-Psychiatry in Relation to Crime and Modern Usages of Hypno-Analysis” At present I’m an assistant medical director at State Psychopathic Hospital.”

When asked if she’s familiar with the philanthropic organization known as The Townsend Foundation, Townsend is the old woman that Martin decapitated. Edwin answers with swift and self-important confidence…

“More than acquainted as Mr Manning knows for the past several years I’ve been trying to get a grant from them to expand my research… ( deep sarcastic Bacallesque pause) I’m still trying.”

Then the public defender asks if she was present when Mr. Manning suggested that the defendant burnt up more than a million dollars. And does she agree with that accounting of the story…

CapturFiles_4

“No, I don’t, the amount of money certainly is unusual but the act of destruction isn’t. Martin Ashely is a lonely secretive young man. Desperately in need of understanding friendship. This type of schizophrenic often is… He became convinced that (Amelia Townsend) was an enemy who was using her wealth to destroy his garden and return him to our hospital where he had been a patient merely three years ago. To his disordered mind, the decision was a simple one. Destroy the persecutor and her weapon… her money…”

Dr. Edwina Beighley is a cool, manipulative operator who is working on getting Martin a plea of insanity so he’ll be sent to her hospital under her care, that way she can make certain she’s up close and personal with him in order to access his secret… where he hid the fortune.

During Martin’s trial, Mr. Manning who has been an executor of the estate asserts that the old woman was eccentric and hid huge sums of cash in her home, he tells the prosecuting attorney, “I couldn’t believe that anyone even a madman could bring himself to burn up more than a million dollars.”

Manning who testifies that the old lady had millions, also despises Dr. Beighley.

Manning confronts Edwina after Trial verdict

After Martin gets sentenced to a mere 90 days for observation.  Manning confronts Beighley in the courtroom. “Dr. Beighley I hope you’ll feel proud of yourself  Dr!”  Dr. Edwina Beighley not seeming rattled in the least- “And what is that supposed to mean?”
Manning- “ Why did you have to go out of your way to help that faker get away with murder and a million dollars?” 

She threatens to sue for liability so that she’ll collect enough from him, never having to apply for a grant again… He tells her that he’s “sick and tired of psychiatrists who try to play god, who tell us our mothers and fathers made us neurotic, and psychotic!”

“Mr. Manning I’ve gone through analysis, all psychiatrists do, Now I suggest you try it!”

Dr. Edwina Beighley has the warmth of a cobra about to strike the jugular.

Edwina lab

This psycho-thriller also stars Stuart Whitman as struggling actor Dale Nelson who is going to be paid $10,000 by Harley Manning (Judson Laire) to impersonate a mentally disturbed man, an incorrigible anti-social bad boy who then purposefully gets arrested for destruction of personal property and disturbing the peace.

Whitman acting

Dale and Manning meet

IMDb notes that Anthony Perkins wanted the Stuart Whitman role

At the police station- Dale (Stuart Whitman) puts on quite a show as a crazy guy with a wad of cash in his pocket that he refuses to explain how it got there- he won’t cooperate and goes off on a tirade that is deliciously absurd…“ The disciples of conformity are bleeding from the narrowness of your mind.” 

Dale acts crazy police station

Manning figures that once Dale gets committed to the state asylum, he can befriend the psychopathic handyman/gardener Martin Ashley (Roddy McDowall with his usual flare for the overly-dramatic, deliciously deliriously overindulgence. ) who is just mad about roses and decapitates his employer Amelia Townsend (Beatrice Grenough) with a pair of garden shears when she interferes with his beloved garden.

Gardenig is fun

Naturally, Dale Nelson succeeds in getting sent to Dr. Beighley’s State Psychopathic Hospital. He even learns about roses and horticulture in order to get close to Martin, hoping he’ll tell him where the money is hidden. Once Dale arrives and is interviewed. Edwina looks him over a bit, and she catches something about his performance, so she has her assistant do a background check on him.

Whitman being intaked

Dale interview hospital

Edwina watches dales intake

Edwina reads Dales file

Dale controntational Edwina intake

Dale gets Dr. Edwina Beighley to assign him to the garden as his work detail. There Dale finally meets Martin the gardener. At first, he antagonizes him, but soon after they become good friends with a love of flowers in common.

Dale and Martin gardening meet

Dale and Martin argue garden

Martin argues about his ability to raise beautiful roses and that he didn’t get to see flowers until he was 16. ‘You don’t get flowers at the orphanage Mister!… I’m the guy who crossbred the Pinocchio with the Fuselier… and it won the first show at the Pasadena in 1962.”

With no intention of trying to cure Martin Ashley of his homicidal criminal nature, Dr. Beighley finally gets him to confess his crime in detail, by subjecting him to hypnosis and pentathol for days where he finally winds up telling her where Mrs Townsend’s money is…

Edwin lunch Martin and Dale

Edwina is rancorous, scornful, and arrogant and by the end of the film, her mania to find the money might either be a sign that she herself is insane or is the catalyst for pushing her off the deep end… Another version of the inmates has taken over the asylum! And Dr. Edwina Beighley might just belong there BUT as the patient and not the doctor….

Edwina eventually finds out that Dale Nelson was paid and is planted in her hospital by her nemesis Haley Manning, who is determined to get her license revoked for her unethical practices.

edwina martin Dale window

When she discovers Nelson’s con game, the sadistic Edwina Beighley prescribes electroshock therapy, then injects a concoction of psychotropic drugs into his jugular vein to induce catatonia, causing him ‘horrible twisted images’ in order to render him useless and get him out of her hair so she can be the sole keeper of the fortune…

Believe it or not this over-the-top psycho-melodrama was scripted by Sydney Boehm who penned such great noir films as -High Wall 1947, Mystery Street 1950 Side Street 1949, and The Big Heat 1953.

Dale talks to Cynthia

The film also co-stars marvelous character actors who play various archetypal characters, the troubled nymph with a mother complex Carol Lynley as Cynthia Lee Albright’s “Don’t touch me, I don’t like to be touched!”

Olive Deering as Mrs. Mellon-“You’re stupid stupid do you hear me stupid.”

CapturFiles_36

Ossie Davis plays Capshaw, who used to be an intern in the hospital and is now one of its residents. Paulene Meyers as Dr. Walden, and Timothy Carey as high-strung and marvelously hulking & nutty as usual.

Paulene Meyers and Carol Lynley

Carey and Whitman lunch

Shock Corridor &  Shock Treatment deal with the outside/inside structure which ends with pessimism as the main characters descend into madness…

Noir shot of asylum beds

From Part-Time Perverts: Sex, Pop Culture, and Kink Management by Lauren Rosewame she cites Peter Cranford a psychologist during the 1940s who said that for many patients in asylums “The words ‘punish’ and ‘shock treatment’ were often synonymous”

This is where the narrative and Dr. Edwina Beighley converge on a social truth behind the institutional edifice of mental health…

She shows her fellow colleagues the results of her research on a projector. Footage from when she had her own facility where she could use zoo animals in her experiments. On film, she shows a tiger being injected with her drug and how it effects their aggression. She seeks to find out more about the chemistry of the mind.. to solve its mysteries. So that one day… her drug “will control mental illness as well a drug does Diabetes.”

Edwina tells colleagues human subjects

This brings out a great point of the story though it may be accidental since the film seems to be more about sensationalist entertainment than thoughtful reflecting on mental illness the way it was let’s say in Tennessee William’s Suddenly, Last Summer 1959.

In the scene where Edwina shows her footage, and the few scenes where both Capshaw (Ossie Davis) and Dale (Stuart Whitman) are subjected to shock treatment- it makes a strong connection between punishing the patient and the arousal of the sadistically inclined practitioners.

Lauren-Bacall-in-Shock-Treatment-1964

In her autobiography, Bacall refers to Shock Treatment as “truly tacky.” when asked about the film she, commented, “You have no idea what Roddy and I went through making that movie.”   

Here’s what Time Magazine had to say about the film Cinema: Boredom in Bedlam-March 13, 1964 “Shock Treatment is more than a slip, it’s a Freudian pratfall. It makes a shambles of psychiatry and brings the art of film close to idiocy.”

McDowall and Bacall

It is definitely not one of Lauren Bacall’s memorable roles, it borders more in the realm of the Grande Dame Guignol films that actresses were becoming famous for in the 60s… Yet, anything Bacall inhabited is like Midus’ golden touch, because she brings an inimitable flavor of sophistication and savvy even if it’s surrounded by trashy lunacy!

Let’s not end on an insane note! Let’s celebrate Lauren Bacall as she really was… an icon.

Headshot of actress Lauren Bacall pictured with her chin resting on her right wrist, USA, circa 1945. (Photo by Archive Photos/Getty Images)
Headshot of actress Lauren Bacall pictured with her chin resting on her right wrist, USA, circa 1945. (Photo by Archive Photos/Getty Images)

 

 

Hysterical Woman of The Week! Olive Deering as Thelma Tompkins from (1959)

Alfred Hitchcock Presents-

Season 4, Episode 25

The Kind Waitress (29 Mar. 1959)

Eleanor+Parker+Hope+Emerson+Olive+Deering in Caged
Olive Deering in Caged (1950) starring Eleanor Parker and Hope Emerson

Olive Deering (Caged 1950, Shock Treatment 1964) plays Thelma Tompkins a kind hearted waitress who toils in a hotel restaurant. She’s attentive and thoughtful doting on old Mrs.Sara Mannerheim (Celia Lovsky) who eats in the restaurant every evening.

CapturFiles

CapturFiles_1

Mrs. Mannerheim tells Olive that she is her only friend and has decided to leave her in her will, also bestowing on Thelma a brooch. But like all dark fairy tales, as the months creep forward, Mrs. Mannerheim becomes increasingly demanding,and Thelma becomes unhinged. You see…

Thelma’s musician boyfriend Arthur gets the idea to precipitate the old woman’s demise, instead of waiting for death to take her by inches, so, Thelma poisons old lady Mannerheim’s tea. Unfortunately for Thelma, the old woman has a constitution of stone and it doesn’t work.

Driven by an obsession to keep her boyfriend happy, and sick and tired of care taking, Thelma cracks and let’s loose her fury on the old lady.

[wpvideo 83ZLq6e0]

Have some tea-MonsterGirl