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The Caretakers (1963)

It's hard to imagine actually going to the movie to see this movie as a kind of entertainment, because it is more an experience and an emotional plea than a good idea for a first date. There's no question it's powerful, sometimes disturbing, and acted and filmed with intensity. It is, in its own way, a great movie, if you measure it only in terms of being moved. It is also a questionable movie in how it portrays these women, all of whom are "borderline" cases, and none of whom are openly diagnosed for us. Still, some of the most radical behavior is stuff I've seen first hand, and so it isn't completely unreasonable.

The big theme is interesting to see in retrospect: this seems to be about the very first shifts from large hospital care of the mentally troubled to residential care. The key to this is the notion that the patients (they call them "consumers" now) can form small, interactive "families" that encourage emotional and psychological support. It's a kind of giant co-counselling, and I think it's been shown to work in the fifty years since.

There are several equally strong characters as the plot follows one and then another, from patient to nurse to doctor. Joan Crawford gives a steely, power-performance as the head nurse, though only now and then. Herbert Marshall briefly appears as an aging, wise figure in his second to last film. The rest of the cast is made of lesser known actresses who act out the different characters of this woman's ward with disarming conviction (or theatricality, if you don't buy into their illnesses). The lead doctor is played by Robert Stack who never strikes me as quite up to any acting task, but then he's just a figurehead of authority and progress. The movie is in the hands of the women.

Director Hall Bartlett doesn't have much of a career as director, but he's managed to get a terrific cinematographer, Lucian Ballard, to make it a visually brooding and beautiful experience. And the music is by one of the best, Elmer Bernstein. The copy of the movie that streams on netflix has a flaw in the sound which was unfortunate--the quiet portions, including some important conversations, were very quiet, and then when the music and screaming explodes in other scenes it'll hurt your ears. Very very loud. It made for a clumsy viewing, moving the volume up and down, backtracking now and then to see what we missed.

Expect to be impressed and moved and possibly slightly shocked. Overlook some of the neatened up psychology that is a product of both the era and the era the movie was made. And don't look for a surprising plot. Instead you'll get to know a few of the women and when it gets to the final scenes it'll be moving and even a little joyous. If you let it.

I find this one of the most difficult films of its era to sit through; it is truly nerve-bending, asinine, and infuriating. if you look upon it as camp, it still is difficult to take unless you like the sight of bizarre creature polly bergen constantly throwing fits and screaming (it's truly horrific) and can tolerate the posturing hero and a story and scenes which purport to shed light on mental illness but is totally phony in every particular. diane mcbain is gorgeous and smug; joan crawford and constance ford as butch as they come; janis paige gives the most enjoyable performance in the film, or at least creates a somewhat believable character till she phonies out toward the end. it's pathetic that maltin and others would even consider taking this film seriously. it is a fairy tale put together by fly-by-night producers for a quick buck who wanted to make it look like one of those 50's/early 60's "message" social reform pictures, and people were dumb enough to accept that.

Sixteen years after The Snake Pit and 13 years before One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, The Caretakers joins their company as `enlightened' explorations of the mentally ill and the institutions that hold them. But The Caretakers stays closer in spirit to Caged, with the female inmates transferred from the Big House to a mental ward called (of all things!) Borderline. (There's actually one holdover from the cast of Caged – Ellen Corby, as a batty old schoolmarm – and one sequence involving a parakeet which almost exactly reprises one involving a cat in the earlier movie.) But while Caged was overwrought but compellingly good, The Caretakers is overwrought and compellingly bad.

The jangly piano music over the titles, with their suggestions of Di Chirico and Picasso's `Guernica,' clue us to the racheted-up, `serious' tone of the movie. But soon we're watching Polly Bergen go flat-out berserk in front of the screen of a crowded theater. An ambulance ushers her into the gloomy shadows (the movie is well photographed) of the mental hospital, where she comes under the care of Robert Stack, who is pioneering progressive and humane methods of treatment (which nonetheless require jolts of electricity to the temples).

But Bergen is but one of the woeful women among whom we divide our time. This is the kind of dramaturgy where, when Barbara Barrie is introduced as never having uttered a word in seven years, we wait 90 minutes with bated breath for her to speak. She's lucky to get a word in edgewise, as recovering prostitute Janis Paige bazoos her way through every scene she's in and steals all the thunder from Bergen's go-for-broke histrionics.

The staff faces its own problems, however. Head of the hospital is Herbert Marshall, looking like he was just trundled in from Madame Tussaud's, but he's just a figurehead who has long since ceded authority to underlings, particularly Joan Crawford. Since she's been saddled with the name Lucretia, with nasty echoes of the Borgias, we know she's not exactly a helping professional. She stands in adamant opposition to everything Stack works for, and relies on head nurse and hard case Constance Ford as her secret agent. Unfortunately, Crawford's role is smaller than we can be sure she hoped it would be (and often her position seems to make sense).

That's about it. We never get to see a promised, climactic board meeting which will decide the fates of Crawford and Stack. That may have been a try for ironic ambiguity, but it looks like the movie just ran out of steam, or money. For some of the patients, rays of hope do pop out of the institutional-grey skies, for Hollywood never acknowledged a problem that couldn't be wrapped up by the last reel. This mixture of high earnestness and wretched overacting is simply stupefying.

One of the most common interest points for me in seeing any film is good concepts or when it takes on a subject not easy to tackle but always worth addressing. Something that was also covered in 'The Snake Pit' and 'One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest'. That was the case with 'The Caretakers'. Plus it had Joan Crawford (though the film was from her twilight years period) and Herbert Marshall in it, Crawford especially was more often than not worth watching despite her film choices being up and down.

'The Caretakers' is not one of her best films, nor does it contain one of her best performances. It is also not one of her worst on either count either. It struck me as a rather disappointing but still semi-watchable film that primarily suffers from how it deals with its subject. It may have had good intentions but it didn't translate in the execution, on this front 'The Caretakers' struck me as somewhat lacking in good taste which was somewhat frustrating.

It is benefitted by some very stylish and atmosphere-laden photography and the setting is suitaably austere. Elmer Bernstein's score has haunting moments.

Did not think much of the acting really, but some of the cast come off well. Polly Bergen may have had some terrible and rather limited dialogue, but she had a quite challenging role and manages to give the character force and nuance. Janis Page also does wonders with a role that sounds one-dimensional but makes it remarkably real.

Elsewhere, we have a stiff Robert Stack looking as if he wanted to be somewhere else, even for a sympathetic character he manages to make the character dull, and Crawford in a part that she should have been perfect for chewing the scenery to smithereens. Marshall also looks ill at ease in a part that has so little to it. None of the characters are written very well at all, too "black and white" so either characters too perfect or ones with not a redeeming bone in their bodies and never really in between (Page's being a possible exception). The direction is bland at best and schlocky at worst.

Although Bernstein's score has moments, too much is ridiculously overblown and over-emphasises the mood too much. The script goes well overboard on the camp, containing some real howlers, and is very awkward such as with poor Bergen in the early stages. The story is a real mess, what could have been a hard hitting and poignant film was instead rather gratuitously distasteful, offered very little insight into the subject, showed no respect for it or its characters and because of its numerous bouts of unintentional humour it was very difficult to take it seriously, something that the writing was not good in general at doing. Almost to an insulting degree.

Concluding, disappointing. 4/10

Ah, crazy people movies. Nothing actors like better than free range to ham it up under the guise of being insane. You know what's really sad? Fifty years later and the portrayal of mentally ill people in movies really hasn't changed much. Anyway, this movie is a drama about the goings-on at a hospital mental ward. In particular doctor Robert Stack, who tackles his greatest "unsolved mystery" in this film: Joan Crawford. Joan plays a hard-nosed head nurse named Lucretia who doesn't like softie Stack's approach to dealing with the loonies. Dated and often silly, it can be a tough slog to sit through. But whenever Joan's on screen, things are more interesting. Seeing Joan in a leotard teaching her nurses self-defense is a must for every Joan fan! I see several reviews comparing this to The Snake Pit, which I find ridiculous. The Snake Pit was a million times better than this. This is a forgettable drama with good intentions that is only memorable for Joan Crawford's supporting part.