Stephanie (January 2006)

Rating: of 5

Joan's first post-Baby Jane film, The Caretakers is a pretty cheesy "women in the nuthouse" picture stockpiled with stereotypical denizens of such film places: a chain-smoking man-hating nympho (Janis Paige, in a funny, scene-stealing role), a lonely semi-senile old woman (Ellen Corby), a Beatnik, a Foreigner, an Annoying Mute...and our heroine Lorna (Polly Bergen), who's gone nuts because her young son died in a car she was driving and because (we later find out)...her father left her cold mother when Lorna was small! (The movie also comes complete with the obligatory shock treatment and rape-by-male-orderlies scenes, which are thrown in completely gratuitously and immediately forgotten as far as the plot goes.)

We can pretty much guess what we're in for from the film's opening credits, which roll over hideous paintings of tormented wretches, accompanied by equally hideous and agitatedly dramatic music by Elmer Bernstein, which are followed by shots of an agitatedly dramatic Polly Bergen sweating and clutching her hair as she loses it in a movie theater and is carted off to a psych ward.

Once at the hospital, we're introduced to the crusading doctor (Robert Stack) in charge of borderline patients. Dr. MacLeod passes out smokes, loosens restraints, and quiets overwrought patients with merely a kindly look or word. He's a proponent of Understanding and Group Therapy, and his one dream is to replace psych wards with "day hospitals." He's challenged in his "newfangled" thinking by the old-school head nurse Lucretia Terry (Joan), who believes in discipline and "the intelligent use of force" (including judo, which we see her teach her nurses) when dealing with patients.

Obviously we're supposed to think Lucretia's an eeeevil Nurse Ratchett prototype, but the examples the movie uses to demonstrate Lucretia's allegedly backward thinking actually, to me at least, prove that she's being unfairly maligned! For instance, there's a major scene where the borderline gals sneak in booze and start whooping it up a bit. One patient (symbolically) frees another's bird from its cage; the bird-owner freaks out; the Annoying Mute grabs the bird... One of Lucretia's henchwomen nurses comes in to settle things down and slaps the Mute when she won't let go of the bird. This prompts Polly Bergen to lunge at the nurse with a knife, and the nurse then uses judo on her (good training, Lucretia!). Now, there was nothing Cuckoo's Nest about this whole scene--- the allegedly mean nurse didn't try to stop anyone from having a good time until after all hell broke loose and she only resorted to judo to avoid being stabbed. Yet the next day, she's being called before the hospital administrator (Herbert Marshall, also Joan's co-star in 1941's When Ladies Meet) and Dr. MacLeod is seriously demanding that she be fired for her "inhumane" treatment of a patient.

The whole movie careens along on this nonsensical axis: random sensationalistic scenes usually followed by confrontations between Dr. MacLeod and Lucretia over nursing methods, none of which contribute to an interesting or plausible narrative.

Joan's role is small and her appearances sporadic; there's really not much she could have done with "Lucretia" other than play her as a hard-ass. Despite the role's harsh one-note nature, though, she does manage to insert a few human touches: At one point, when Lucretia sees Dr. MacLeod approaching, she smiles and softens briefly... only to slam her iron mask back into place once he immediately starts berating her. A small enjoyable subtlety amid all of the obligatory wild-eyed looks and pseudo-psychiatric theory flying about in this film.

Scott  (July 2005)

Rating:    of 5

The Caretakers is a bizarre and grim film experience. It's trying to make some serious points about the treatment of those with mental illness, but it's really an over-the-top mental hospital drama with some embarrassingly bad stretches of overacting.  I remember seeing one critic's comments that some of the scenes seemed like high school improvisational theater, and the scenes with the patients play that way:  let's just sit in a circle and be crazy.  Polly Bergen and Robert Stack are the stars here.  Polly didn't seem to have a clear idea of how to approach her character, but that's probably the script's fault.  She has so many changes in mood from scene to scene that you're exhausted after watching her.  And Robert Stack seems a bit miscast because he lacks the warmth that his crusading doctor needs.  Janis Paige as a loud nymphomaniac and Ellen Corby as a sad, defeated woman who seems to have lost her grip on reality are the only ones who really come off well from this group.