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.