Bedlam

With Halloween coming up, it might be a bit surprising that I haven't done much in the way of horror this month. But a nominal horror movie I recorded some months back is coming up on TCM again in the run-up to Halloween, so I watched it in order to be able to do the post here. That movie is Bedlam, which gets a showing tomorrow (October 28) at 3:30 PM.

It's 1761, which an opening title card informs us is the Age of Reason in Britain. St. Mary Bethlehem, which understandably got shortened to "Bedlam" and is a real place that is indeed the source of the word "bedlam" in modern English, is an insane asylum treating -- for some values of treating, as we'll see later in the movie -- mental patients. One of the patients tries to escape and falls off a roof to his death. At the same time, wealthy Lord Mortimer (Billy House) is driving by the asylum and, seeing the commotion, realizes the dead man is an acquaintance.

Mortimer has a girlfriend Nell (Anna Lee), who hears about this, and is horrified. What she doesn't know is things are a whole lot worse than this. Quaker stonemason Hannay (Richard Fraser) sees the head of the asylum, George Sims (Boris Karloff), about a job, and is offered the job on the understanding that he quote an official price more than what he told Sims he could do it for, with each of them pocketing some of the difference since the money is coming from the government. This sort of graft is a sign that there's more going wrong in the management of the asylum.

And then Nell learns how truly bad things are when Sims brings some of the patients to a party Mortimer is giving and having them provide "entertainment" that is in general degrading and even fatal to one of them. Nell is in attendance and is even more horrified by this, asking Mortimer and fellow politician John Wilkes to do something. The two seem willing to do something, but then Mortimer may be in on the graft too. Sims is no dummy, and starts whispering in Mortimer's ear that the improvements Nell would like would cost Mortimer hundreds of pounds in taxes. This is enough to get Mortimer to say no.

Worse, Mortimer and Sims realize what a danger Nell is to them. So they come up with a fairly ridiculous scheme, which is to have Nell committed involuntarily to the asylum through a committal hearing which seems like it has no real basis in law, although I'm not quite certain what the laws on these things were in early Georgian Britain. Thankfully, Nell had previously run into Hannay at some point, and Quakers have a reputation for wanting to institute the same sorts of social improvements that Nell did even if Nell isn't a Quaker herself. So Hannay tries to get in to see Nell, having to resort to trickery. Nell, for her part, tries to keep her sanity, and tries to find the closest to sane fellow inmates to try to see if she can enlist them in some sort of aid.

The opening credits to Bedlam state that the story is based loosely on that told in The Rake's Progress, a series of paintings by William Hogarth. Indeed, dissolves from one scene to the next use the paintings as a template, giving the movie a stylish appearance for a low budget 1940s horror film. The story is OK if not great, and the acting is certainly good enough. So while Bedlam is not an all-time classic, I think it certainly deserves to be better remembered than it is 80 years on.