Dr. Wonderful and the big bad asylum: Dissecting simplicty in The Snake Pit
On the surface, Anatole Livak’s The Snake Pit (1974) contains little more than a socially conservative overuse of pseudo-Freudianism. The film has been rightfully criticized for its departure from the novel on which it was based, specifically in its more traditional approach to Virginia, its female protagonist. To simply dismiss The Snake Pit for these reasons, however, would not do justice to the film’s importance within the history of cinema and psychiatry. This article will analyze the historical and cinematic factors that influenced Litvak’s The Snake Pit, a film worthy of both praise for its social impact and blame for its failure to go far enough. Keywords: Anatole Livak; cinema; history of psychoanalysis; Sigmund Freud; Hollywood