Really Surprised!

if their story seems completely bonkers, almost like a feverish work of fiction, you ain't heard nothing yet.

Yes, absolutely, there is fun to be had, as well as many, many things to go boom, all amid an atmospheric urban jungle.

This is a dark and sometimes deeply uncomfortable drama

All-star cast cannot decide on window treatments. Angst ensues. Movie about the pitfalls of overthinking your interior-decorating. Perfect movie for the absurdist-sacastic. Do not play a drinking game with the word "draperies" as your shot-trigger - because, alcohol poisoning.

Well what was that?! Cockamamie confection isn't even psychiatry lite just some nonsense that's all about the DRAPES!!!! Truly odd film is loaded with great actors and a ludicrous story. How it ever got the green light from the studio is mystery number one, that Vincente Minnelli said okay to directing it is the second although that would explain why so many great actors allowed themselves to be involved.Everybody gives overheated performances except Lauren Bacall who keeps a low-key dignity amongst the melodrama and Susan Strasberg offers a restrained quiet portrait of a shut-in who is making her first tentative steps towards reemerging into the world. The rest of the players aim for the rafters to varying degrees from Richard Widmark's impassioned but distracted doctor who is merely agitated then there is Lillian Gish who chews a bit of scenery as a bitter spinster as well as many other respected actors who show little restraint. The real standout though is Gloria Grahame as Richard's hot mess of a wife, she seems to realize how silly the whole thing is and pitches her performance to that tempo, she's jittery, flouncy and fun plus she looks great. Laughable take on mental health but good for one fun viewing as a camp catastrophe.

You can see what attracted Minnelli to this story, as it's partly about a conflict over decor. Maybe this worked in the novel, but it's hardly the stuff of compelling screen drama. Of course the choice of drapes is symbolic of independence to the patients, and symbolic of her power to Miss Inch, and it's actually a realistically mundane conflict such as might actually occur anywhere. It just seems to be much ado about nothing when it's acted out.Minnelli uses a bit of the soundtrack of Seven Brides For Seven Brothers, here (the picture that trumped his own Brigadoon at the box office) - in a scene at the movies. Guess he had no hard feelings.One of Minnelli's interesting misfires. Even though it doesn't really work, I've seen it three or four times.The acting is good, overall. Richard Widmark (as the director of the clinic) has two leading ladies, Lauren Bacall and Gloria Grahame. This is one of the few times I've ever really seen Grahame miscast. She had a wide range, after all she played everything from Violet Bick in It's A Wonderful Life, to Rosemary Bartlow in The Bad And The Beautiful, to Ado Annie in Oklahoma. But I think you will agree her role defeats her best efforts here. She starts out very well but I'm not sure I always understood where she was coming from as the film wore on. Bacall plays a simple, sensible girl, and does a good job. Lillian Gish plays the unpredictable Miss Inch, Charles Boyer the self-destructing Dr. Devanal, John Kerr the young and artistic Stevie (a role originally announced for James Dean). Oscar Levant is called upon to go outside his usual comfort zone and I'm not sure he makes it. Susan Strasburg is excellent in a small role.

A rather curious film directed by Vincent Minelli, who always was a perfectionist with his sets and actors,I am confounded as to what his inference with the drapes as metaphor;at the end patient John Kerr uses them as a blanket to get a good nights sleep.Lauren Bacall,always an interesting presence,is a young widow and psychiatrist working at an elite institution (I assume a take on the Karl Menninger Institute in Topeka Kansas).Psychotherapy was at the height of its popularity in this era, it was almost "de rigor" for creative wealthy people to enter an elite institution,even when often there was very little wrong with them,other than needing a dose of real life.Richard Widmark as the clinic director is quite interesting, even as his marriage to Gloria Grahame is falling apart and he becomes interested in Bacall.The drapes, and who will re-design them for the library is the primary theme here, strangely.Widmark remarks to the clinic patients that they are attempting to run a cooperative society,and this is clearly difficult.However it is difficult not because of the patients,but the doctors and their drama.Overall an interesting curiosity,I infer that Minelli was making a commentary on the overwhelming popularity of psychoanalysis in Hollywood, at the time.8/10.