The Caretakers

                        Janis Paige and Robert Stack                       

Hall Bartlett's The Caretakers is a turgid 1963 melodrama almost wholly set in a public mental hospital. The film is complete dreck, possibly the worst American feature of that year. Mr. Bartlett was at least consistent. His 1973 film of Jonathan Livingston Seagull is one of the worst American films of any decade. Bartlett co-wrote the script with Jerry Paris who makes a brief cameo appearance during the film's opening as Polly Bergen runs into him on the street. Ms. Bergen then enters a movie theater and has a public meltdown which gets her a one way ticket to the loony bin. Bergen's performance is the type of Oscar grasping fiasco that can blight a career and it did. The rest of the cast is made up of fresh faces (Diane McBain, Robert Vaughn) and veterans reaching the end of their tether (Joan Crawford, Herbert Marshall). For the record, the best performances are by Ellen Corby and Barbara Barrie.

The Caretakers was made with the best intentions. Its brief is to make the case for the deinstitutionalization of public mental health in America. Making that case is Robert Stack as a crusading psychiatrist who has the novel notion that mental patients would be helped best by being treated like human beings as opposed to inmates. Most of the film is taken up by the group therapy session with his borderline patients, Bergen and a motley group of female patients each with a separate tic and traumatic backstory. Opposing the newfangled notions Stack champions is head nurse Crawford, here monikered Lucretia,  who wants to treat the inmates as the crazies they are. She touts the safety of the staff as her first priority. The camp highlight is the judo class Lucretia "teaches" in which Crawford and a bevy of beauties don leotards. Crawford sports a bizarre blonde wig. Indeed, The Caretakers is a veritable wig fest, an unsparing look at how the conformist styles of the 1950s were getting a little rococo in the Kennedy era before all hell broke loose. Individual characters' sanity levels can be gauged by how askew their wigs are. It is that kind of movie.

Yes, a movie that is over serious, slipshod, and kooky. The Caretakers feels both endless and abortive. Plot lines, like the film's parallel romances amongst the staff members, feel truncated. Bergen is about to be gang raped by the men's ward when the film cuts to her being comforted by Stack and the cast. What the heck happened! Bartlett utilizes a lot of distorted POV shots when Bergen is first in the hospital, but then drops the technique like a hot potato. Stack was the most emotionless actor of his generation, but the film gives him a traumatic backstory that explains his lack of people skills. He gives a committed performance, I'll avoid the obvious joke, but it ends up over emphasizing the overly earnest humorlessness of the project. Such talents as Lucian Ballard and Elmer Bernstein worked on this picture. All for nought. 

Though worthless as art, The Caretakers is interesting as a reflection of changes within the American mental health system. The borderline diagnosis was first formulated in 1938 by Adolph Stern. To boil it down to its essence, it describes patients who veer from neuroticism into psychosis. The concept took some time to be accepted which The Caretakers reflects. It was not until 1980's DSM3 that the diagnosis was codified by the America's psychiatric establishment. The Caretakers presents a false dichotomy between borderline patients and other mental health sufferers. In the film, if you aren't borderline, you are seemingly doomed to wallow in a catatonic state. The Caretakers posits outpatient clinics as the hope for the post-institution future. Needless to say, things have not worked out that way. The legacy of deinstitutionalization stalk the streets of America's urban centers to this day.

I think that the nature of psychiatry and mental health therapy is antithetical to drama. This is probably why the two best American nut house movies aren't really about mental health issues, but are allegorical portraits of the nation: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and Sam Fuller's truly great and crazed Shock Corridor.

Liliom (1930)

                             Lee Tracy and Charles Farrell                         

Frank Borzage's Liliom is an uneasy mixture of fantasy and romantic melodrama from 1930. The source material for the film was Ferenc Molnár's play which also served as the basis for Rodgers and Hammerstein's musical Carousel. A word about Mr. Molnár aka Franz Molnar aka Ferenc Neumann. Even though his plays are rarely performed today in America, Molnar's work was widely popular and revered in the first half of the 20th century. Over a hundred films have been derived from his work which also includes such chestnuts as The Guardsman, The Swan, One Two Three, and The Good Fairy. Liliom was a flop when it first premiered in Molnár's native Budapest in 1909, but a Broadway production with Joseph Schildkraut and Eva La Gallienne in 1921 proved to be a runaway hit and established the play in America. Molnar's work is marked by fantasy and romantic wish-fulfillment, but there is a decided element of realism in his mix. Certainly, Liliom's striking his daughter in the concluding section of this film gives it a slap of reality especially compared to a modern marshmallow confection like Project Hail Mary.

Liliom proved to be a flop at the box office and I think I know why. Borzage and his art director, Harry Oliver (Seventh Heaven, Scarface), give the film a look that is both spare and expressionistic. The fairy tale nature of the tale is reinforced by this look, but it is also designed to heighten the grim determinism of the tale's moral. The lights of the carnival where Liliom (Charles Farrell) works as a barker are visible from the absurdly huge window in the denuded tenement where his lady love Julie (Rose Hobart) toils. The glittering artifice of the carnival cannot mask the base passions and treachery that motivate Molnár's characters. The slashing angles of the steps and bridge where a bungled robbery leads to a suicide emphasize that the characters in the film are caught in a trap of their own devising. Yet, I feel that audiences had had enough of this look, a vestige of the recently departed silent era and its masterpieces by Borzage and Murnau. Liliom is also paced deliberately like a silent film which helps gives an otherworldly feel that is appropriate for the film. However, by 1930, this too felt out of date and the modern rat-a tat-tat rhythms found in Scarface and James Cagney features would soon be ascendent.

The most obvious flaw of Liliom is the miscasting of Charles Farrell in the title role. Farrell had co-starred with Janet Gaynor in a recent spate of hits for Fox and Borzage. Farrell always seems a lover not a fighter. His character is a brash and macho narcissist who beats Julie and is easily led into criminality. Farrell is not nearly brutish enough for the role and his pinched voice doesn't help. Borzage wanted Farrell for the role, over Joel McCrea, and Farrell does have his moments when Liliom shows vulnerability. Ultimately though, he cannot exude the thoughtless brutality of the character. Rose Hobart fares better in her film debut. She was plucked, like a lot of actors in response to the coming of sound, from Broadway. Significantly she was a member of Eva Le Gallienne's Civic Repertory Theatre. Some have ventured that Janet Gaynor would have brought a nice sweetness to the role of Julie, but I find Ms. Hobart's sullenness to be appropriate for the character, a much put upon serving girl. Like Farrell, Hobart would soon descend to B pictures. Farrell ended up being a longtime mayor of Palm Springs, whereas Hobart would fall afoul of the blacklist; allegedly fingered by Lee J. Cobb. Still, she achieved immortality thanks to the divine intervention and devotion of Joseph Cornell. 

The supporting cast of Liliom is largely a delight. Lee Tracy is perfect for the role of "The Buzzard", a  smooth-talking brigand who coaxes Liliom into criminality. Tracy would have a brief ascendancy before his misadventures in Mexico. Dan Duryea would eventually don Tracy's mantle as Hollywood's number one weasel. H. B. Warner's uprightness is perfect for once as the "Chief Magistrate". I also enjoyed the efforts of Estelle Taylor (dripping venom), Bert Roach, and Anne Shirley. The film, for both good and bad, is all Borzage. His naive Catholicism makes his romanticism seem corny and out of date to some modern viewers, but I find his films to be fervent and memorable in the brief glory he grants his lovers. Even when his lovers suffer, they do so beautifully. Liliom is currently streaming on Tubi in a good print comparable to the one on the Murnau Borzage Fox box.

As an aside, I have only seen one production of Carousel that captured the underlying grimness contained in Molnár's original. It was Nicholas Hytner's Royal National Theatre production. Hytner prefaced the musical with a rhythmic pantomime of Julie and her cohorts working in a mill. This established the dull and repetitive nature of Julie's life and undercut the cloying sweetness that undermines most productions of the piece. 

Highest 2 Lowest

Denzel Washington

Spike Lee's Highest 2 Lowest is a dully mechanical remake of Akira Kurosawa's High and Low. Alan Fox's script changes the locale to New York and makes the 'high' character, Denzel Washington's David King, a music executive, but the core narrative remains the same. In both films, kidnappers target the son of the executive, but wind up snatching the son of his driver (here the always exemplary Jeffrey Wright) instead. Highest 2 Lowest never really recovers from its laborious and trite setup. Pretty much every member of the cast urges King to pay the ransom money, but he hems and haws how the music business has changed and the crime is ruining his last chance to be top dog. No one in his right mind, even if they haven't seen High and Low, thinks that King will not do the right thing.

The film gets better when it slips into action mode in its second half. Lee has always been expert in his use of New York locales and I enjoyed the tunes employed that range from Rogers and Hammerstein to Eddie Palmieri. Washington is always fun to watch and gets to both puncture his own pomposity and remain a kick ass dude. I very much enjoyed his face-offs with Princess Nokia and A$AP Rocky. Nonetheless, this is not a memorable film. Like many a Spike Lee joint, it feels over stuffed and gaseous. The film is at least twenty minutes too long. As with his version of Old Boy, Highest 2 Lowest is an unnecessary redo. High and Low is available to stream for free on Tubi and is highly recommended.