TACOMA, Jan. 26 - (AP)
"Frances," a film about the late movie actress Frances Farmer (which plays at 8 p.m. tomorrow at the Paramount Theater and begins a regular run Friday at United Artists' Cinema 70), is enjoyable, but inaccurate in portrayals of conditions and incidents at Western State Hospital in the 1940s, three former nurses at the hospital say.
The trio also praises Jessica Lange's portrayal of Miss Farmer, saying she reminds them of the woman they helped care for nearly four decades ago.
Miss Farmer, a Seattle native, was an inmate at Western State from 1944 until 1950.
"I never saw people naked there," Mary Burchett, who worked at Western State from 1939 through 1972, said after seeing a preview of "Frances."
"And I never saw a soldier there at any time," said Ethel Sass, who worked at the hospital at the time.
In the movie, soldiers are shown raping Miss Farmer at the hospital.
Beverly Tibbetts, who was at the hospital from 1947 to 1982, said: "I never heard of anybody bringing in a truckload of soldiers until the book came out" (a biography of Farmer by William Arnold, Seattle Post-Intelligencer film critic, titled "Shadowland").
Mrs. Tibbetts said men and women were kept strictly segregated at the hospital.
Ms. Burchett said Miss Lange "behaved on the ward in the movie just like Frances did in real life."
"She picked her own friends. Everybody on the ward had their own job, and she selected a job in the dining room to be close to the one woman on the ward she was close to."
The three nurses said they felt that Miss Farmer's behavior while in the institution was sufficiently anti-social that she belonged under hospitalization.
"As I understand mental illness, she was mentally ill," Mrs. Burchett said.
"I didn't know her mother, except to open the door and let her come in. She seemed nice. She was concerned about Frances."
Mrs. Tibbetts' husband, Leon, also a former hospital employee, recalled seeing Miss Farmer on the hospital grounds and at dances.
"We would take the men from the male wards to the dances, and they would bring the women from the female wards," he said. "Frances Farmer was very popular at the dances. The men patients liked to brag that they had danced with a movie star, so she caused quite a stir among them. And she was kind of flirtatious with the boys."
The women said they were sure Miss Farmer had electric-shock treatments at Western State, because such treatments were fairly common in those days.
Mrs. Tibbetts, who worked with patients who had been given lobotomies, said a lot of such operations were performed at the hospital back in the '40s, but not on Miss Farmer as claimed by the movie and by the biography.
"I'm sure Frances Farmer didn't have one. I worked on all the patients who had lobotomies, and Frances Farmer never came to that ward," Mrs. Tibbetts said.
Article appeared in the Seattle Post Intelligencer, January 26, 1983
Provided by Ulrich
Fritzsche M.D.