---
title: "The Snake Pit"
year: 1948
kind: "film"
canonical: "https://film.one/film/the-snake-pit"
fi1m_score: 76
critics_score: 75
critics_reviews: 5
published: "2026-09-20T01:52:44.286309+00:00"
updated: "2026-09-20T01:52:59.944969+00:00"
region: "US"
licence: "© Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL."
---

# The Snake Pit (1948)

Directed by Anatole Litvak · 1h 48m · Drama, Mystery

**Fi1m score: 76** · Critics 75 (early) from 5 reviews

*In a sentence:* A hospital where getting better means moving to a smaller number and the nurses are scarier than the patients

> Anatole Litvak’s asylum drama is carried by Olivia de Havilland, who plays a woman lost inside her own head without a trace of vanity. The wards are frightening and true; the psychiatry that explains her is tidier than any mind we have met.

## Synopsis

Virginia Cunningham (Olivia de Havilland) comes to on a bench in the grounds of a state hospital with a man’s voice asking her questions and no man in sight. She thinks she is in a prison, or a zoo. A fellow patient, Grace (Celeste Holm), tells her where she actually is. When her husband Robert (Mark Stevens) visits, she does not recognise him and is not sure she wants to. Dr Mark Kik (Leo Genn) takes her case, beginning with electroshock, and pieces her story together from the fragments she can remember. The hospital sorts its women into numbered wards, and the lower the number, the closer to the door. Nurse Davis (Helen Craig) runs the one Virginia is on.

## Review

Virginia Cunningham sits on a bench in the grounds of a state hospital and cannot say how she got there. A man’s voice is asking her questions, and there is no man. It takes a fellow patient, Grace (Celeste Holm), to tell her where she is, and a visit from her husband Robert (Mark Stevens) to tell her who she is, and she believes neither of them. Anatole Litvak’s film, adapted by Frank Partos and Millen Brand from Mary Jane Ward’s novel, spends most of its 108 minutes inside that confusion, and its best decision is to stay there for as long as it can.

The hospital runs on numbers. Ward One is for women nearly ready to go home; the numbers climb as the patients get worse, and everyone knows what the top number means. Dr Mark Kik (Leo Genn) takes Virginia on and starts with electroshock. That sequence horrified us, and not because of what it shows. Litvak stages it as routine: a trolley, a rubber gag, a nurse counting, the next patient already waiting. Leo Tover keeps his camera on de Havilland’s face and lets everything around her go soft, so we get what she gets, which is a light, a hand, and then nothing.

Tover has one shot everyone remembers, and it deserves to be remembered. Virginia has been moved to the worst ward, and the camera lifts straight up and away from her until the women on the floor beneath stop being women and become a pit of moving bodies. It is the image the title promises, and the film has earned it by then. Dorothy Spencer’s cutting between the hospital and Virginia’s past uses her voiceover as the seam, so a question from Kik lands us years back in her life without a dissolve to warn us. It is a neat way of showing a mind that does not know what year it is.

De Havilland does not protect herself. Her hair is unpinned, her eyes never settle, and she answers the voice in her head out loud in the middle of other people’s sentences. Watch her at the wire fence with Robert, trying to work out from his face what a husband is supposed to feel like. She plays a woman who is frightened of being found out as mad and equally frightened of being found sane and sent home to a life she cannot remember. Genn is a calm, low-voiced presence who never raises his voice, and Helen Craig’s Nurse Davis is the villain the wards require, all keys and smiles. Beulah Bondi’s Mrs Greer, Lee Patrick, Ruth Donnelly and Natalie Schafer fill the day room with women who are funny as well as ill, and Litvak has the decency to let them be both.

What does not work is the cure. Once Kik has Virginia talking, the film starts to believe that a person is a lock and the right memory is the key, and it goes looking for the key with a chart and a pointer. Leif Erickson turns up in the flashbacks as Gordon, a man from her past she would rather not think about, and we will say no more about him. The consulting-room scenes are the least alive in the film: two people in chairs, one of them explaining the other to herself. Alfred Newman’s score does not help, swelling under every breakthrough where Litvak had been content to keep quiet. Dr Curtis (Howard Freeman), the administrator who counts beds and wants them emptied, is a stock figure and plays like one.

Measured against the asylum films that came after it, this one is more honest about the wards and more credulous about the doctors. Forman’s *One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest* would not trust a psychiatrist to hold a door open. Litvak trusts his to hold a mind together, and the film is weaker for it. But nobody in 1975 shot a shock treatment as plainly as Tover does here, and nobody made the corridors look so long.

There is a dance late on, in a hall with a band, and a patient sings. We were moved more than we expected to be, and it was the hall that did it: a hundred women who have been shouted at for two hours suddenly allowed to stand still and listen. Watch it for de Havilland and the wards. Forgive the doctor, as she does.

*Fi1m score 76, published 20 September 2026.*

## What the critics say

With only 5 reviews in so far, the lean is warmly positive, and the praise gathers around two things: Olivia de Havilland’s performance as the committed woman, and Anatole Litvak’s handling of the asylum interiors, which most critics find both clinical and tense. Several reviews of the period treat it as a serious, adult drama on a subject rarely attempted, and note that it is not comfortable viewing. The one reservation comes from a later reappraisal in Time Out, which argues the film now reads as lurid melodrama, its case for treatment muddled and its documentary-style ward footage uneven. Nobody disputes de Havilland.

### Reviews we read (5)

- **The Hollywood Reporter**, THR Staff (90/100, inferred): The critic hails the film as a compelling, dramatically exciting, and courageous masterpiece that boldly tackles a mature subject with entertainment value. Litvak's direction is singled out for its superlative artistry in building and sustaining tension. [Read](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/snake-pit-review-1948-movie-1154565/)
- **The New York Times**, Bosley Crowther (90/100, inferred): The film offers a true and illuminating presentation of a young woman's experiences as a psychotic in a mental institute, with uncommon integrity, perception, and cinematic clarity. It is a mature emotional drama on a rare theme, though disturbing and not for the weak. [Read](https://www.nytimes.com/1948/11/05/archives/snake-pit-study-of-mental-ills-based-on-mary-jane-wards-novel-opens.html)
- **The New Yorker**, John McCarten (70/100, inferred): An excellent movie that probes faults in mental hospitals and psychiatric techniques like shock therapy, with strong performances from de Havilland and Genn. Litvak makes effective use of grim interiors but may not fully convey the pathos of the patients' antics. [Read](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1948/11/13/good-case-work)
- **Variety** (70/100, inferred): A standout among class melodramas that probes mental illness processes with razor-sharp forthrightness and matter-of-fact clinical detail. It displays the makeup of patients without minds and the treatments to restore them. [Read](https://variety.com/1947/film/reviews/the-snake-pit-1200415732/)
- **Time Out**, GA (55/100, inferred): The film is now best appreciated as lurid melodrama rather than the mature realistic drama it was once seen as. Olivia de Havilland's performance as the committed woman stands out amid muddled advocacy for treatment and uneven documentary-style asylum footage. [Read](https://www.timeout.com/movies/the-snake-pit)

## Details

- **Director:** Anatole Litvak
- **Director:** Anatole Litvak
- **Screenplay:** Millen Brand, Frank Partos
- **Novel:** Mary Jane Ward
- **Cinematography:** Leo Tover
- **Editor:** Dorothy Spencer
- **Music:** Alfred Newman
- **Producer:** Robert Bassler, Anatole Litvak
- **Cast:** Olivia de Havilland as Virginia Cunningham; Mark Stevens as Robert Cunningham; Leo Genn as Mark Kik; Celeste Holm as Grace; Glenn Langan as Dr. Terry; Helen Craig as Nurse Davis; Leif Erickson as Gordon; Beulah Bondi as Mrs. Greer
- **Runtime:** 1h 48m
- **Release (the US):** 4 November 1948
- **Genres:** Drama, Mystery

## Where to watch in the US

- Amazon Prime Video: rent $3.99, sd
- Apple TV: rent $3.99, sd
- Amazon Prime Video: buy $4.99, sd
- Apple TV: buy $4.99, sd

*Checked 2026-09-20.*

Also available in: CA, US. Add `?region=XX` to this URL for another country.

## Awards

- Bodil Award for Best American Film 1950: Bodil Award for Best American Film (won)
- Academy Awards 1949: Best Actress (nominated); Best Director (nominated); Best Original Dramatic or Comedy Score (nominated); Best Picture (nominated); Best Writing, Adapted Screenplay (nominated); Best Sound (won)

## If you liked this

- *One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest* (1975), Fi1m 86: The same wards a generation on, with the trust in doctors removed entirely. — [Fi1m page](https://film.one/film/one-flew-over-the-cuckoos-nest.md)
- *Family Life* (1971): Loach’s answer to the asylum film: quiet, English, and furious about who gets committed.
- *A Woman Under the Influence* (1974): Gena Rowlands falls apart in a kitchen and nobody around her knows what to do.
- *Shock Corridor* (1963): Fuller’s lurid cousin: a reporter fakes madness and the hospital obliges him.
- *Titicut Follies* (1967): The documentary that shows what Litvak’s wards looked like without the actors.

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© Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL. Canonical: https://film.one/film/the-snake-pit