#grindhouse film

I Never Promised You a Rose Garden (1977)

Directed by Anthony Page

Doomsy’s Rating: 63/100

I’ve praised the production talents of Roger Corman, the exploitation film maestro who single-handedly invented the grindhouse genre, many times before on this blog. Well, I never thought I’d see him go so far as to make a sleazy film set in a mental hospital with ambitions well beyond its genre. This is one strangefilm. In fact, I can’t say I’ve seen many like it. Kathleen Quinlan, who would later become a character actress of quite some brilliance (in films such as Event Horizon andThe Hills Have Eyes remake) plays a girl named Deborah who by the looks of modern psychiatry, seems to suffer from a psychotic and dissociative disorder. She spends most of this film’s 90 minutes strapped to a bed in a mental institution, lost in a haze of delusion and suicidal ideation. Bibi Andersson, best known as Ingmar Bergman’s muse, is her sympathetic doctor (hilariously named Dr. Fried) and together they must help poor Deborah out of her psychoses. And honestly, that’s pretty much it.

First thing to say is, from a present-day perspective this is one seriously depraved affair. I couldn’t help but wonder if this was made by Corman as a quick cash-in on the heels of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and while that certainly is likely, I Never Promised You a Rose Garden is an entirely different beast. While Forman’s film was concerned with the tragic nature of the McMurphy character and his battle with Nurse Ratched, director Page and Corman seem less concerned with narrative and more with histrionic art-house surrealism in the vein of Ken Russell. And boy, is this sordid tale trippy. The hallucinatory scenes are jarring and often-times overwhelming, calling to mind certain scenes from Dennis Hopper’s The Trip and Bergman’s The Seventh Seal. I’d also be remiss if I didn’t call attention to the bizarre casting. In supporting roles, we find Danny Elfman (!) leading some weird Monty Pythonesque knights haunting the protagonist, Mel Gibson and Dennis Quaid as baseball players in dream sequences, and Lorraine Gary (Mrs. Brody from Jaws)playing the main character’s self-absorbed mother. Oh, and Reni Santoni (RIP) as one of the most evil orderlies this side of Ben Stiller in Happy Gilmore.

Beyond the simplistic narrative, there’s a not-so-surprising amount of exploitation content in the film’s mental hospital setting, some of which is inappropriately played for laughs, but most of the rest is relegated to frankly disturbing scenes of human suffering. Most of the time, when Hollywood tackles subjects like severe mental illness and long-term hospitalizations, there is a certain artifice only possible when audience attention spans are in the forefront of the producer’s minds. Most viewers who view this will be stunned to find the lack of characterization and narrative more indicative of a documentary, the camera merely observational and the message being one of understanding and empathy. 

The film this reminds me most of is Allan King’s docudrama Warrendale, which at ten years older, had the benefit of being a much more shocking experience. What Page and Corman bring to the catalog of suffering is more up-close-and-personal and exhausting than King, who brought a more detached filmmaking style. I think beyond the hysteria and shrill insanity that pervades most of this film’s runtime, there is something interesting going on here. I’m just not sure what it is. I did have a bit of a headache after finishing this, but that could have just been the copious amount of weed and vodka I had just consumed. Who knows.