Bedlam (1946)
Directed by Mark Robson

Film Review

The last of eight supremely atmospheric horror B-movies that producer Val Lewton made for RKO, on a shoestring budget, Bedlam is easily one of his best, and certainly one of the most memorable horror films of the 1940s.  Unlike most films of the genre, which resort to cheap sensationalist tricks to provoke an audience reaction, Bedlam curdles the blood by more subtle and ingenious means, digging its claws deeply into the fear centres of our imagination.  Boris Karloff is spared the indignity of having his face plastered with make-up but he still manages to give one of his most frightening performances, oozing sinister malevolence throughout the film as the totally misguided asylum director who earns his suitably gruesome comeuppance. 

Karloff's character is far from being the archetypal two-dimensional villain in which the actor was often cast.  He is cunning, amoral, and occasionally charming, not just an evil madman.  His actions are motivated purely by personal ambition and are merely representative of society's attitudes towards the mentally ill at his time.   Relishing the first rate script that Lewton and director Mark Robson concocted for him, Karloff turns in his most commanding and nuanced screen performance, which is admirably well-matched by a talented supporting cast.
       
Early in his career, director Mark Robson shows how expressionistic lighting and shot composition can be used to create a sustained mood of menace, presaging his subsequent great films noirs.  The most memorable sequence, in which the arms of the wretched inmates of Bedlam suddenly burst out of their cages when Richard Fraser walks along a dark passage, has since been emulated hundreds of times and has become a stock cliché of the horror genre.  The film was inspired by William Hogarth's A Rake's Progress (a series of paintings that end with a young wastrel being committed to Bedlam), so it feels appropriate that these images should be used (as woodcut prints) to link the various passages in the film, another effective stylistic touch. 

Val Lewton's low budget horror films of the 1940s all deserve their reputation as classics of their genre (I Walked with a Zombie, Cat People and The Body Snatcher are also well worth seeing), but Bedlam stands out as the most sophisticated and unsettling.  There are no excursions into fantasy, no attempts to invoke the supernatural, just a chillingly authentic portrayal of a world that once existed, within the impenetrable walls of a seemingly benign institution which became a byword for pandemonium.  Nightmares are made of this...

Film Synopsis

London, 1761.  George Sims is the apothecary general of at St. Mary's of Bethlehem Asylum, commonly known as Bedlam, an institution which serves as a dumping ground for society's mentally ill.  Far from caring for his patients, Sims treats them no better than animals and they live, neglected and abused, in abject squalor.  Lord Mortimer, a pleasure-seeking aristocrat, is outraged when an acquaintance of his dies whilst trying to escape from the asylum.  Sims placates him by getting his patients to put on a grotesque show for him.  When she sees the conditions within the asylum, Mortimer's protégée, Nell Bowen, is appalled and commits herself to reforming the institution, with the help of Whig politician John Wilkes.  But before she can have any effect, Sims acts to have her committed to the asylum.  Nell's only hope is a Quaker stonemason she has befriended.  If he cannot get her released, she will die within the Hell on Earth that Sims has created...