Bedlam is a 1946 American horror film starring Boris Karloff and Anna Lee, and was the last in a series of stylish horror B films produced by Val Lewton for RKO Radio Pictures. The film was inspired by William Hogarth's 1732–1734 painting series A Rake's Progress, and Hogarth was given a writing credit. Plot It is 1761 in London at an asylum for the mentally ill and an acquaintance of Lord Mortimer dies in an attempt to escape from the asylum. Master George Sims appeases Mortimer by having his "loonies" put on a show for him. Mortified by the treatment of the patients, Mortimer's protégée Nell Bowen seeks his aid, then seeks the help of Whig politician John Wilkes to reform the asylum, threatening Sim's corrupt practices. Mortimer and Sims conspire to commit Nell to the asylum, where her initial fears of the fellow inmates do not alter her sympathetic commitment to improving their conditions as she tends to the comfort of her fellow inmates. Alarmed by Bowen's imminent release, following legal pressure from Wilkes, Sims plans to apply his most drastic "cure" to her, but his attempt...