Unlike Bette Davis, who parleyed her WHATEVER HAPPENED TO BABY JANE?/’62 comeback into a twenty-five year ‘third act,’ co-star Joan Crawford couldn’t stop a fast slide into B-pics and progressively trivial tv gigs. Yet you might not have seen a fast fade from this follow-up, a forgotten medical drama crammed with acting personaly (Robert Stack, Polly Bergen, Robert Vaughn, Herbert Marshall, Janis Paige!), top-tier below-the-line talent (lenser Lucien Ballard; composer Elmer Bernstein), and stop-the-show supporting villainy from a surprisingly comely Crawford. (Late Crawford always a gamble in the looks department.) Even dud director Hall Bartlett (of the unintentionally hilarious ZERO HOUR/’57, inspiration for AIRPLANE!/’80) can’t kill an interesting setup that has Crawford as stern head nurse at an insane asylum, fighting the newfangled ideas of kindly doc Robert Stack. He’s trying to bring a psychological approach to ‘borderline’ mental patients he thinks can still be ‘helped’ rather than merely ‘held.’ Electroshock Therapy meets Group Therapy; an idea odd enough to somehow ring true. The film at its best during those group sessions, with a lens-hogging cast of loonies offering up various stages of Method Acting distress, and director Bartlett unable to keep comic angles from breaking out. In the juiciest role, Polly Bergen is off her head right from the start, losing it at a second-run showing of WEST SIDE STORY*, and apt to go off at any moment all thru the pic. You never do figure out how this large facility works, Bartlett taking little interest in quotidian activities, no meals, no showers, no lock-downs, no mail call. Just a bit of suspense on whether Dr. Stack will win support for his Day Care program. Next year, saw Crawford strapped in William Castle’s STRAIT-JACKET, a career move she never quite got out it.
ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *The theater Bergen goes to is the Regency Bruin Theatre, the same venue Quentin Tarantino memorably used in ONCE UPON A TIME IN HOLLYWOOD/’19.
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