Bedlam (RKO, 1946)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Ironically, when I first encountered the Val Lewton films with Boris Karloff (I was working through the Karloff filmography from Forrest J. Ackerman’s memorial book, The Frankenscience Monster, and catching his movies one by one as they appeared on TV) I liked Isle of the Dead better than I do now but I didn’t care as much for the last in the sequence, Bedlam. Today it’s a film that has grown on me and seems much deeper and richer now than it did in my teens! It probably helped when I first watched it with Charles, who was still attending Quaker meetings when we first dated and responded to the fact that the film’s romantic lead, Hannay the stonemason (Richard Fraser), was a Quaker. (Charles and I made one of the catch phrases from the film, "Are we lovers tht you thee and thou me?," a pet phrase between us.) According to Mark Robson, who not only directed Bedlam but also co-wrote its script with “Carlos Keith” (a pseudonym for Val Lewton), the film was inspired by a column in a Hearst publication, the American Weekly, called “Secrets of the French Police.” Robson was fascinated by an item in the column one week about a man named “Tom O’Bedlam.” Looking it up in a reference book (the 1940’s equivalent of Googling it), Robson found out that “Bedlam” had been a real place, a nickname for St. Mary’s of Bethlehem Hosiital for the Insane, and it had figured in William Hogarth’s famous series of etchings, The Rake’s Progress, of which Plate 8 depicted the inside of Bedlam and the horrible ways its inmates were treated. “We practically used Hogarth as our art director,” Robson later said.

From the Hogarth drawings and other historical sources, Robson and “Keith” concocted a tough, no-nonsense story about the vain and foofy Lord Mortimer (Billy House) and his companion, Nell Bowen (Anna Lee). Nell is a former actress who lives with Lord Mortimer, travels with him and makes her living keeping him amused. Among other things, she has a pet parrot whom she’s trained to say, “Lord Mortimer, what a pig, his head’s too small and his belly big.” Lord Mortimer is also on the committee of the British government which supervises Bedlam, whose master is George Sims (Boris Karloff). Sims is a nasty piece of work who not only brutalizes the inmates – in the opening scene either he or one of his guards is shown stepping on the hands of an inmate named Colby who’s attempting to escape, causing him to fall to his death – but tries to offer Hannay a bribe, which Hannay righteously if a bit stuffily refuses. Sims offers to supply a company of his lunatics from Bedlam to perform at a party given by Lord Mortimer at which opposition politician John Wilkes (Leyland Hodgson) of the Whig Party is also in attendance. As part of the entertainment Sims presents “The Gilded Boy” (Glenn Vernon, who’d also appeared for Lewton before in his 1944 juvenile delinquency film Youth Runs Wild), an apparition painted in gold from head to foot, and he’s supposed to deliver a doggerel verse written by Sims in praise of Lord Mortimer. Only the Gilded Boy’s head-to-food makeup has choked off the pores of his skin, so he can’t breathe and he suffocates to death (a gimmick used 18 years later as the opening of the James Bond movie Goldfinger).

Nell presents a proposal to Mortimer for improvements at Bedlam, including giving the inmates real beds instead of piles of straw to sleep on and improving their food and living conditions. Mortimer at first appears to agree, until Sims talks him out of it by pointing out how much the taxes on Mortimer’s own properties will have to go up to pay for all the improvements at Bedlam. A disgusted Nell walks out on her benefactor and Mortimer retaliates by taking back all the furniture he gave her in the years they were together, though she insists on keeping the parrot. Mortimer tries to send agents to buy it, but she won’t sell it. So he and Sims agree to have Nell committed to Bedlam, where at first she’s scared of her fellow inmates but soon her basic decency and goodness win out over her initial revulsion. She tears off bits of her petticoats to relieve the pain of an inmate whom Sims has locked into a cage-like device whose restraints chafe his arms. When Sims gets wind of what she’s up to, he punishes her by locking her into a cage with a particularly brutish inmate, but she manages to reach out to him by helping him remember what he was looking for when he was committed. Stonemason Hannay sneaks into Bedlam by joining a work crew that got the job he bid for and didn’t get because he wouldn’t accept Sims’ bribe, and he talks to Nell. Spe pleads with him to give her a weapon, and at first he explains that as a Quaker he never carries arms. Then she asks for his trowel because it has a sharp point which she can use to stab someone if she needs to, only someone in Bedlam steals it from her.

The film ends with Hannay and Wilkes plotting to free Nell from her unjust commitment, only Nell, sure that Sims won’t let her survive the evening before her case is supposed to be re-heard, escapes through the same window Colby tried to get out from and couldn’t in the opening scene. For the ending Robson and “Keith” ripped off two classic stories – Fritz Lang’s 1i31 film M and Edgar Allan Pie’s short story “The Cask of Amontillado” – by having the inmates at Bedlam overpower Sims and stage a mock trial in which they find him guilty of abusing them. Then the woman who stole Hannay’s trowel from Nell uses it to stab Sims, and the inmates seal himup by building a brick wall in front of an alcove where they stuff his body – only we get a terrifying close-up of Sims’ face with his eyes moving, letting us know they’re burying him alive. The authorities enter Bedlam and decide that Sims must have fled the country when he realized they were onto him for embezzling money meant to care for the inmates at Bedlam and spending it on himself and his long-suffering wife (Lewton regular Elizabeth Russell). Hannay figures out the truth when he notices the cement on the inmates’ wall is still wet, but in the end he decides that it’s the better part of humanity not to report them for fear the inmates would be treated even more severely if the authorities find out what really happened to Sims.

Bedlam is a remarkable movie in every respect, a worthy finish to Val Lewton’s tenure as an RKO producer even though, according to the film’s Wikipedia page,it lost $40,000 on its initial release. The main problem with Bedlam was that the British Board of Film Censors slapped a total and absolute ban on showing the film there which lasted until the end of the 20th century. That cut off the film from the world’s second largest market for English-language movies. The British Board oif Film Censors had already demanded five cuts in the previous Lewton/Karloff film, The Body Snatcher, an adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s short story of that title which was itself inspired by the real-life murders committed by William Burke and William Hare to supply bodies for dissection at the University of Edinburgh Medical School in 1928, and most of the deletions the censor board demanded were of scenes that mentioned the real Burke and Hare. The total ban slapped on Bedlam seems to have come from a similar concern: the censor board simply didn’t want British filmgoers reminded of these particularly sordid parts of their country’s history. Today, my husband Charles told me, the former location of Bedlam is now the site of the British Imperial War Museum – so, he joked, people are still paying money at the site to witness other people’s insanity.