Word: asylumed
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...plot of the movie is the true story of Mary Jane Ward, as taken from her book. It begins with her first realization that she is in an insane asylum. The movie then traces her gradual recovery through two relapses to an eventual release. As she moves through several stages of the asylum on her way to improvement, groups in all conditions of insanity surround her, from Bedlam-like unfortunates to the mildly eccentric...
...stark horrors of the public asylum are realistically presented to show the terrifying fate of the mentally sick. An ignorant doctor and a power-loving nurse each causes relapses when the patient is almost recovered. Her cure is the work of one doctor who takes special interest in the case. Without this doctor, she would be one more at the bottom...
...picture follows Virginia's progress through the various wards, divided into descending degrees of misery, like the circles of hell. Throughout, it preserves the novel's sharply observed minor touches of asylum life-the nurses' way of speaking in front of inmates as if they weren't there (as some adults speak in front of children); the strange snobbery of the sick who look down on their sicker fellows; the large-looming small idiocies of institutional bureaucracy, such as the clean carpet in one ward which must not be stepped on (and the wonderful old woman...
...picture's greatest merit is its memorable types: the inarticulate young girl whose frozen, dangerous fear seems to choke her like a stone lodged in the throat; the nurse whose own mind has worked loose in the buffeting, jarring atmosphere of the asylum and who now wanders through her ward, forlornly keeping imaginary records...
Another excellent scene: an asylum dance. On one side of the hall the women are lined up, coquettish in spite of their drabness; on the other side are the slicked-down men with little bouquets and candy boxes in their hands. To the stringy tune of a bored band, the partners hop and skip through their dance, distorting it like forlorn children at dancing school. The scene is only slightly harmed by an overlong, over-sentimental group singing of Going Home, timed with the heroine's own realization that she is indeed going home...