by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Afterwards they showed Escaping the Madhouse: The Nellie
Bly Story, an engaging tale based on the
true story of the pioneering woman journalist Elizabeth Cochrane, better known
under her pen name “Nellie Bly,” who joined the Pittsburgh Dispatch and wrote a series of trail-blazing articles about
the hard lives of working women — until their employers, also the paper’s
principal advertisers, complained and the editor exiled her to arts and
fashion, the usual domains to which women journalists were relegated at the
time. Bly hooked up (platonically) with Joseph Pulitzer and the New
York World and decided to expose the foul
conditions at New York’s Blackwell’s Island, then site of an insane asylum for
women (it’s now known as Roosevelt Island and is the site of a housing
development). She rented a room at a boarding house and faked accusations
against the other residents so she could get herself declared insane and locked
in the asylum herself. After 10 days Pulitzer sent members of her staff to
“out” Bly and get her released, and her articles led not only to a series of
exposés in the World but a
best-selling book, Ten Days in a Mad-House.
From these facts Lifetime writer Helen Childress and director Karen
Moncrieff (kudos to Lifetime and their producers, Bly Films and Julijette, for
giving both these jobs to women!) spun a tale in which Bly (Christina Ricci)
runs afoul of the asylum’s authority figures, particularly Matron Grady (Judith
Light in a superbly icy performance), who survived a history of childhood
sexual abuse by becoming totally hard-ass towards her charges. Matron Grady
makes Nurse Ratched from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest look warm and fuzzy by comparison, and the rest of
the staff — most of them women who took the jobs because they couldn’t find
anything else, and who are paid so little they are forced to live on the island
(one woman tells Bly the cost of a ferry to the mainland is an entire week’s
pay for them) and are almost as much prisoners as the inmates. Bly’s one
sympathetic contact among the authority figures is Dr. Josiah (Joseph Bowman),
a recent import from Britain and an advocate for more humane treatment of the
inmates, including loosening the painful bolts by which their shoes are
permanently attached to their feet. Bly also befriends an inmate who insists
she’s from New York’s socially prominent Hollister family and who freaks out
even more when her blue blanket — her one souvenir of the child who died in
infancy, precipitating her mental breakdown — ultimately immolating herself
with the kerosene in which she and the other inmates have been soaked to rid
them of (nonexistent) lice, and setting the fire by stealing Matron Grady’s
pipe.
Midway through the story writer Childress pulls one of the switcheroos so
beloved of Lifetime’s scribes: after Matron Grady has accused Bly of cruising
the good doctor and trying to pull him away from his marriage, it turns out
that he’s the one who’s been
after her. Indeed, he was fired
from his last job in Britain and forced to emigrate because he was what today
would be called “sexually inappropriate” with one of the inmates of the women’s
asylum he was working at there. We learn this when Bly’s real boyfriend,
Bartholomew “Bat” Driscoll, shows up demanding her release — and Josiah puts
him off and says she’s already left. Ultimately it takes the intervention of
Joseph Pulitzer himself to get Bly out so she can write her articles, publish
her book and get both Matron Grady and Dr. Josiah arrested. Charles saw the
promos for this and wished they’d done other aspects of the real Nellie Bly’s
story — including her trip around the world (she was fascinated by Jules
Verne’s novel Around the World in 80 Days and wanted to see if she could beat his time — which she did, by eight
days) — but as it stands it’s a quite good film, weakened by some of the usual
Lifetime contrivances but with the period mostly convincingly reproduced
(though in one bit of dialogue that zinged out as an anachronism to both
Charles and I, Dr. Josiah refers to Bly as having “paranoia,” a Freudian term
that wasn’t in general use in 1887, when the story takes place) and Ricci and
Light living up to their feature-film reputations while Bowman effectively
delineates both aspects of his character and the actors playing both Bat and
Pulitzer (not listed — not yet, anyway — on the film’s imdb.com page) making
appropriate last-minute rescuers for Our Heroine.
