All done in the best possible taste!
Quite a wild movie as I remember it when it appeared on UK TV over thirty years ago (don't think it's ever been aired since). Before the credits have even run we already have Roddy McDowall, at his most nonchantly nutty, decapitating his benefactor with a pair of garden shears. This unsociable act gets him commmited to a secure home for the very confused under the smoulderingly cunning charge of Dr. Lauren Bacall. In an effort to discover what happened to the Roddy's fortune a local ham actor, Stuart Whitman, is hired to get himself commited to the same asylum. This he does subtlely by hurling a trash can through a store window, and sunbathing with the mannequins, speaking gobble-de-goop, shaking hands with the wrong hand and closing his eyes by using his fingers to push his eyelids together.
Once he's in the asylum he meets nympho Carol Lynley (what is it with these type of psycho-dramas that portrays a woman who actually enjoys sex as some kind of headcase?), and compulsive saluter Ossie Davis. And because Dr. Bacall suspects him of faking he is given a healthy dose of ECT, as if Sam Fuller's "Shock Corridor" never happened - this is a pretty nasty scene which is lovingly filmed. If you thinks this is all pretty implausible, stick around for the film's climax.
I may have misremembered some of this, but what is certain is that Bacall completely disowns the film, hating to be reminded of it and apart from "Sands of the Kalhari" and "Those Magnificent Men..." Whitman found decent parts increasingly hard to come by after this particular charmer. A film expert tells me this film was also banned in the UK for a time.
The career of director Denis Sanders seems equally bizarre. From an adaption of Doesteovsky through to two credible music documentaries, enthusiastically sidestepping for the shlock of "Shock Treatment" and "Invasion of the Bee Girls" often made me wonder if there were two Denis Sanders operating.
And all based on a story by the gloriously named Winifred Van Atta. With all due respect, who she?
Supernatural perhaps, baloney perhaps not