In case some might be interested, Blackwell's Island is a real island in New York City's East River and is now called Roosevelt Island. It used to hold the prison depicted in this film, and an insane asylum. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roosevelt_Island
shareThat island, swinging place that it was, also had the NY state small pox hospital. They're reinforcing the rotting walls of it now so they can have guided tours at the end of 2012.
A hydrocephalic takes pleasure in milking his cranial harp.
When I lived in the city, I used to take the New York Waterways excursion boat up the East River to go to night games at Yankee Stadium. It was an exquisite tour of the city from the viewpoint that most never take the opportunity to see. When passing by Blackwell's Island, later, Welfare Island and today Roosevelt's Island, the first thing you'd see was the grim hulk of the ruins of the Renwick designed smallpox hospital at the extreme Southern tip of the island. Quite a haunting view.
The island has quite notorious history, obviously. Nellie Bly's Ten Days In A Madhouse is a wonderful read. She managed to go undercover as a crazy person and get herself committed to the insane asylum, writing one of the first exposés of its kind, "Ten Days In A Madhouse" in which she outlined her first-hand witnessing of terrible brutality toward the patients/inmates and which brought her great fame and caused much outcry and prompted needed reform of what was going on there on Blackwell's Island.
Still, corruption managed to regain a foothold, especially in the prison, which this film attempts to dramatize. Outrageous accounts of crime bosses running the place - - quite literally, the inmates running the asylum.
We get a great view of the prison in the Clark Gable & Carole Lombard film, No Man Of Her Own.
Some of the nightmarish torture scenes from Conspiracy Theory were filmed in one of the, then closed and now gone?, hospital buildings.
Watching Blackwell's Island tonight. Will post remarks...