Some Elements of Style

I promise to knock off the asylum business after this post, but it would be a shame to have done all that research without sharing this wild documentary about WWII veterans suffering from PTSD in 1946. Back then, it was called a battle-induced neuropsychiatric disorder – I think the acronym is a little more palatable.

John Huston directed this documentary (the same director who did The Maltese Falcon, The Asphalt Jungle and The Misfits, to name a few) under commission from the United States government. Unfortunately, the documentary wasn’t actually released until 1980, because the material it showed made soldiering look debilitating, even if it made psychiatry look good.

This was filmed at Mason General Hospital on Long Island, an offshoot of the Pilgrim State and Edgewood hospitals (the latter has been mostly razed to the ground, but you can find some great pictures of teenage vandals from the 80′s drinking 40s in the abandoned facility here). There are a lot of fascinating moments, and some questionable miracle cures brought on by injection and hypnosis. I find myself questioning a lot how much of this documentary was staged, but in any case the soldiers seem really genuine and likable, and John Huston’s directing gives the whole film a nice dramatic flair. It’s long, so watch the whole thing or skip around, you’ll find something cool.

Film courtesy of nuclearvault’s channel ‘Vintage Military Films‘, which I will now be watching non-stop.

Also, here is an amazing 1938 map of Pilgrim State from an old copy of LIFE. Click to see it up close and personal.

And thanks to the wonder of GoogleMaps, here it is today – mostly demolished.

All rubbly and stuff.

This entry was posted on May 27, 2010 at 6:03 pm and is filed under Films, Found Item, Uncategorized, Vintage with tags 1938, 1946, asylums, Edgewood, Edgewood Psychiatric, Google Maps, hypnosis, John Huston, Let There Be Light, LIFE, Long Island, Mason State, Memorial Day, Pilgrim State Hospital, psychiatric hospitals, veterans, WWII. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.