As a child in the 1970s I always used to look forward to the Summer months when BBC 2 used to have horror double bills in the late evenings . These would usually feature the Universal Frakenstien and Dracula franchise along with some other movies like THEM , THE MUMMY and occasionally a Hammer horror . I do remember seeing a Boris Karloff movie called BEDLAM and thought that it only qualified as a horror movie because of Karloff and after seeing it again tonight it's obvious that it's not a horror film , more of a dark period drama
Taken on its own BEDLAM isn't a bad movie though it's by no means a great one either . The uneven quality probably is probably due to the star billing taking precedence over the story which is something of a pity . Yeah okay Karloff can exude menace but the story doesn't really pick up until we're introduced to the main plot of Nell being interned in the notorious lunatic asylum and this doesn't happen till half way through the movie . Until then we've got to put up with long talky scenes with characters speaking in rather irritating mid Atlantic accents . The rather dated feel surrounding mental health doesn't help either since the heroine describes the inmates as " Loonies " even though she doesn't mean any malice and I don't know if it's deliberate but someone seems to have confused sanity with intelligence . Does knowing the alphabet and being able to count mark you out as being sane ?
I couldn't help noticing a very interesting subtext when the main plot takes off and that's that the movie sides with pacifist quaker philosophy . In 1946 the Western World had united to help defeat that Hitler chappie and rightly or wrongly this could only have been achieved through the violence of war . Are the producers sticking up for pacifist ideals ? Probably not and it's open to interpretation but I think BEDLAM is analogy for the Soviet Union where people of all faiths were imprisoned in psychiatric hospitals . It should also be remembered that a year previously the Soviet Union and the West were brothers in arms united in their opposition to Hitler which may explain the somewhat confused moral message of the movie
Taken on its own BEDLAM isn't a bad movie though it's by no means a great one either . The uneven quality probably is probably due to the star billing taking precedence over the story which is something of a pity . Yeah okay Karloff can exude menace but the story doesn't really pick up until we're introduced to the main plot of Nell being interned in the notorious lunatic asylum and this doesn't happen till half way through the movie . Until then we've got to put up with long talky scenes with characters speaking in rather irritating mid Atlantic accents . The rather dated feel surrounding mental health doesn't help either since the heroine describes the inmates as " Loonies " even though she doesn't mean any malice and I don't know if it's deliberate but someone seems to have confused sanity with intelligence . Does knowing the alphabet and being able to count mark you out as being sane ?
I couldn't help noticing a very interesting subtext when the main plot takes off and that's that the movie sides with pacifist quaker philosophy . In 1946 the Western World had united to help defeat that Hitler chappie and rightly or wrongly this could only have been achieved through the violence of war . Are the producers sticking up for pacifist ideals ? Probably not and it's open to interpretation but I think BEDLAM is analogy for the Soviet Union where people of all faiths were imprisoned in psychiatric hospitals . It should also be remembered that a year previously the Soviet Union and the West were brothers in arms united in their opposition to Hitler which may explain the somewhat confused moral message of the movie