THE CARETAKERS kicks off with a dramatic 12-minute opener, Elmer Bernstein’s nervy score backing dark-artsy credits followed by Polly Bergen having a screaming meltdown in a theater, an ambulance and a psych ward. After that arresting intro it isn’t too long, though, before you realize certain personages involved in this 1963 melodrama—its director, his screenwriter and some performers—are escapees from Camp Campy. Reviews at the time were not positive, but the film did reasonable business, $4,500,000 docking #58 in the States, with maybe another $2,400,000 internationally. Time then locked it away (in ward 6), but recent examination reveals an under the radar camp classic. Why weren’t we told? It ought to have been enough warning seeing that it co-starred Joan Crawford as the head of the nurses running the women’s ward. Duck & cover!

At ‘Canterbury’ mental asylum, boundary-pushing psychiatrist ‘Dr. Donovan MacLeod’ (Robert Stack) seeks to prove that ‘Borderline’—his ultra-freewheeling group therapy theory—can bring far-gone patients out of their misery. Head nurse ‘Lucretia Terry’ (Crawford) insists on strong-arm discipline. Lucretia (great name to trust) teaches her nurses judo. On stern Stack’s hopeful team are Van Williams and Susan Oliver, while Joan’s surly chief enforcer is done by Constance Ford. An obviously ailing Herbert Marshall is the weary yet wise head of the hospital.

Besides Polly Bergen’s don’t-hold-back-one-atom ‘Lorna’ (exorcising whatever nerve endings remained after being pawed by Robert Mitchum in Cape Fear) other patients include bitter, tough-talking hooker ‘Marion’ (Janis Paige), childlike finger-snapping beatnik-gone-Bellevue ‘Connie’ (Sharon Hugeuny) and ‘Edna’ (Barbara Barrie), who lurks, doesn’t speak, but manages to crush a pet bird and start a fire. Cue the cure.

Henry F. Greenberg’s script and whatever director Hall Bartlett used of it compressed Dariel Telfer 404-page experience-based novel into 97 often frenzied minutes of in-yer-puss screen time. Clunky editing doesn’t help ridicule-inviting situations that come on like migraine jabs. It’s usually the actors who get blamed (and garner the laughs) for going over-the-top in Stress Exercises like this, but here they’re pawned by the directing, writing and editing, so they deserve a little slack. That ham-fisted direction and hatchet editing make perhaps their most glaring flaw with Bergen’s Lorna, who, already hysterical, gets gang-raped after somehow getting lost in the men’s worst-case dorm (the hospital remarkably lax enough to qualify as a V.A. site) and then makes an instant recovery in the next scene.

Janis Paige, 1922-2024

Two stand out. Foremost is the always welcome Janis Paige, who tears into her role—a ball of cruel wit, learned savvy and innate carnality—and sells it forcefully and without excess. Robert Vaughan has a moving cameo role as Bergen’s hurt and helpless husband; it’s a very different role for him and he interprets the man’s anguish with quiet dignity. Lucien Ballard’s excellent b&w cinematography was Oscar nominated and those familiar with the great Elmer Bernstein’s musical style will instantly recognize and appreciate his sound.

With Diane McBain, Ellen Corby, Ana St. Clair (aka Ana Maria Lynch), Pamela Austin and Brian Corcoran (looking like his better known brother Kevin). Not to be confused with Harold Pinter’s British-made drama The Caretaker, also released in 1963.

* Producer-director Hall Bartlett didn’t go in for subtlety. His credits include Korean War platitude-barrage All The Young Men, Zero Hour!, the airsick aviation germ that hatched Airplane!, and Jonathan Livingston Seagull, which squawks for itself: we submit https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/30736/jonathan-livingston-seagull/ . The sincere, passionately acted yet also absurd and exploitative The Caretakers fits with the early 60s psychodrama strain begun with 1962s  David And Lisa and Pressure Point, continued in ’63 via Shock Corridor and Captain Newman M.D., with Shock Treatment and Lilith following in 1964.