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Mental Major 
>
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DISABILITY |
Mental
psychiatry |
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DIRECTOR |
Vincente
Minnelli
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NOTES |
Life, as it
was known in the 50s, in a psychiatric clinic where |
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you strain
to distinguish the staff and the patients. The |
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madness of
all rotates around a set of curtains. No puns |
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please and I
don't think it's spiders who are spinning them. |
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This is a
very strange film. It really is all about curtains. |
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There is
such a famous cast of patients and doctors the clinic |
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must be in
Hollywood. The doc (Widmark) is over worked at |
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the clinic
and has trouble at home with his wife (Grahame).
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The clinic
is more like some informal health resort for the well-off. People
move around aimlessly not as real mental patients
often do but under the director's orders to make things look
busy. One patient drifts by saying "I detest myself".
Another rambles on about Caligula. A young man who probably
fancies the doc's wife and is fancied by an insipid
young woman says his troubles began when he started to
fall apart following his mother's death. The young woman in
question is "phobic" and has never been out of the clinic. |
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The presence
of Bacall is ominous. As the doc's marriage |
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deflates so
he and Bacall inflate. |
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Notes
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