The Shrike

Joseph Kramm's Pulitzer Prize-winning drama, The Shrike is a compounded horror story. It is frightening as a possessive wife's conquest of a man who wishes desperately to escape her, and as a failure of inadequate and dangerous psychiatric techniques which become the woman's weapon.

The Shrike is also exciting theatre. In the tense antiseptic air of a hospital wardroom, the horror creeps in as the man slowly realizes that it is impossible to prove his sanity. By subtly exaggerating all his slight abnormalities, the woman convinces the doctors that he is mentally unsound. And with their limited understanding, these psychiatrists add her reports to the man's attempted suicide to emerge with a neat and totally inaccurate diagnosis. From that point, they call anything he says the ravings of an insane individual.

Van Heflin plays the tortured man with rare balance. As the doctors force his personality into a crippling semblance of text-book sanity, he realizes he must bend or remain permanently in an insane asylum. Behind the doctors is always his wife, their symbol of sanity, and finally he grovels before her rather than remain with the terror of the hospital's inmates and its cold, insensitive physicians. Gradually, then, Heflin's will bends, and breaks completely.

As his wife, Doris Dalton is a woman who loves her husband, but would rather have him broken than not at all. The chief psychiatrist, played by Kendall Clark is an unimaginative idiot, who cannot think beyond a work association test. Clark's acting, however, makes the man a bit too stupid to be believable.