Before Apocalypse Now became the definitive retelling of L. Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz, Samuel Fuller’s brilliant B-movie masterpiece Shock Corridor (1963) lay claim to that odd distinction. It is a deliriously schlocky commentary on the societal ills of the nation in the early sixties, a period plagued by hourglass concerns like the Cold War, McCarthyism, seething race relations, and the still-seeping wound of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

It was a tremulous time in the United States – a strange and claustrophobic moment on the verge of a catastrophic upheaval. What Allen Ginsberg might’ve called “the animal soup of time.” by the way – read Ginsberg’s Howl right now – it’ll aid in our brief discursive discussion of Fuller and Shock Corridor - follow this link, I’ll wait:

http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Lofts/7923/howl.html

Panting hot on the heels of John Frankenheimer’s definitive McCarthy slam, The Manchurian Candidate, Samuel Fuller took his special brand of tabloid cinema mad-dashed it with the Beat Generation’s cafés and coffee mugs: fashioned with his clay-stained hands a disjointed howl for the finest minds of his generation, destroyed by madness. Shock Corridor, make no mistake, is nothing more than a rhythmic cock and endless balls – dreams and hallucinations wrapped around a mysterious journey of hidden purpose and deceptive intent. Ostensibly a murder mystery set in an asylum boiling with nymphos and other exciting deviants, Fuller takes his rather loose and sensationalistic premise and uses it as an excuse to excoriate societal ills like racism, red-baiting, and the madness of the nuclear chess match. Kubrick would take up the same mantle in Dr. Strangelove - visceral histories understanding that the most important element of history-pieces is often tone.

the low down

Johnny Barrett (Peter Breck: The Sword and the Sorcerer) is a journalist (just like Samuel Fuller was), sniffing after the Pulitzer like he was a Tom and it was a bitch in heat. Prepped by a pair of double-talking head-shrinkers, Johnny goes deep undercover in the loony bin to ferret out the murderer of kindly inmate, Sloane. The only witnesses? the inmates. His stripper ladyfriend Cathy (Constance Towers: The Naked Kiss), helps in his ruse, pretending to be Johnny’s incestually traumatized sister and demanding that Johnny be institutionalized - a pity that the well-meant shock treatments seem to have convinced Johnny that Cathy is actually his sister just before jolting him into forgetting his name.

tabloid cinema

Through it all, Johnny the reporter (the classic voyeur) dreams of his wanton Cathy (the classic object) – the embodiments of Fuller’s vision of the master and margareta, the Lacanian unobserved observer that is the audience and the defiled mistress that is the film. Orson Welles’s unshot script for Heart of Darkness opens with a shot of a theater audience that is comprised entirely of movie cameras – the original title for Fosse’s Cabaret was I Am the Camera.

Fuller is playing in all of his films (particularly this one and Naked Kiss), with the nature of observation and reportage – the role of the director in the absolute mastery of the image and the inference. When Johnny goes mad and imagines that he is indeed the incestual brother to his whorish girlfriend, Fuller as much as says that the act of watching is lurid and masturbatory – any lessons learned therein are lessons of the self.

Oz

So Johnny the camera is The Wizard of Oz’s Dorothy, picked up by a tempest of madness and given, like Dorothy, projections of his own psyche as companions on his journey through his unconscious. Fuller’s not content with the personal demons of a pre-pubescent child and her developmental specters, however, and presents Johnny as a greater manifestation of the collective ego – his internal wonderland an explosion of collective shadows.

- The dead man Sloane is the Wicked Witch of the East, crushed by a house (note that Johnny eventually takes credit for Sloane’s murder although he, like Dorothy, is logically – though not symbolically – blameless for their respective tragedies).

- Toto is Pagliacci (Larry Tucker: writer for Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice). Named after Leoncavello’s murderous clown (Shock Corridor’s Pagliacci admits to, likewise, killing his wife – though this could be a reference to his alter-ego), Pagliacci acts as Johnny’s grounding in the asylum; the go-between bridging the reporter and each of the three main projections in the asylum.

- The Scarecrow is Stuart (James Best from one of my favorite “Twilight Zones” – “Jess Belle”), a young man who’s been captured in Korea, brainwashed (get it? brainwashed? Scarecrow?), and turned to Communism – later turned back, then demented and bent until his conception of self is as a Confederate general in our Civil War that my esteemed colleague sloucho referred to as “an act of ineffectual amputation.”

- The Cowardly Lion is Boden (Gene Evens: Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid), a former nuclear physicist who’s lost his nerve for the destructive arts and spends his days sketching portraits with crayons and playing hide & seek with his ward mates.

- The Tin Man is Trent (Hari Rhodes: Conquest of the Planet of the Apes), a black man so ruined by prejudice and hate that he’s decided to join his oppressors and become the first black grand wizard of the KKK.

- The yellow brick road is the titular “shock corridor” – called “the street” in the film – a long hallway where the inmates mingle with one another and where each of the three monologues presented by Scarecrow/Stuart, Tin Man/Trent, and Lion/Boden take place.

There is no Wizard in this institutional Oz, no curtains and no secrets revealed by prying animal guides at the end of the shock corridor. When this investigative Dorothy is ready to awake from her fever dream, she opens her eyes to a world similarly black and white, but identical to the madness of her fantasy – an ironic Serling-esque twist that plucks the hero from the maelstrom and deposits him right back into the maelstrom.

The recently deceased Douglas Adams once wrote of a man who had a house built so that the inside appeared to be the outside so that he could live outside of the asylum that was the world. Samuel Fuller’s Shock Corridor similarly suggests that the United States is a place driven mad by red-fear (Scarecrow/Stuart), by nuclear-fear (Lion/Boden), and by racism (Tin Man/Trent) – each representative of collective madness is given an opportunity to detail the travails that have lead them to this icy Rockland where Ginsburg promises: fifty more shocks will never return your soul to its body again from its pilgrimage to a cross in the void . Fuller tells us in each of these benighted monologues that the thing to blame is lack of education coupled with a fulsome fostering of bloated ignorance and hatred.

Scarecrow/Stuart was raised by his parents on a “diet of hate” so that any attempts to turn him against his country were doomed to succeed. Lion/Boden knew not what he did when he began to play marbles with sub-atomic particles, and Tin Man/Trent the victim of the unbearable weight of all the racial ignorance of centuries of indoctrinated bigotry.

conclusions

Shock Corridor is very simply a brilliant bit of subversive cinema. It is a B-movie that satisfies the tenets of the asylum genre complete with a flesh-rending maenadian nympho attack, shock therapy, sheafs of psycho-babble, men in white suits, and clothes-ripping overacting (the worst offender being Breck as Johnny who is still perversely effective). Yet beneath the surface, through a rabbit hole, into the middle of a tumultuous and eternal tea party lurks a screaming Beat caricature of the collective unconscious of the spirit of that age.

It is a Wizard of Oz trope (that is itself an ancient trope), that poses its secondary characters as projected shadow elements of its main character – and the main character of Shock Corridor, Fuller is quick to remind us, is the voyeuristic represnation of the audience. Of you and me, boyo.

This little drive-in money maker is vintage, classic Fuller – Russ Meyer with a brain and a dissident streak that speaks with the raw poetry of Ginsberg and Cassaday.

Fuller puts on his beret, lights up a thin one, and riffs on 1963’s cultural psychosis, a generation cracking its head open on the sidewalk and having its imagination eaten whole by paranoia, hate, and a dedicated and communal derision for education. The great irony of Shock Corridor is that the audience that watched it for the first decades of its existence were the very ones formulated to the wall by its stunning erudition.

You might chuckle when Tin Man/Trent gets a catatonic inmate to heil der fuhrer and mutters “lookee, here, the Statue of Liberty,” but Fuller wasn’t laughing. I wasn’t either.

Shock Corridor is an angry howl – a film that can be exploded scene-by-scene by a reading of Ginsberg’s Howl (clued in the film by Trent’s Beat rhythm nightmare of natives in the wood), or a contemplation of what it means when the psychoanalytical critical strategy applied to The Wizard of Oz (clued in the film by repeated dream sequences shot in 16mm color) is then projected on to a collective vision of the United States as a giant sanitarium with unfit and suspicious leaders.

Even Fuller’s hero, the lone journalist figure, is, in the end, just another nut in the hatch. Remember that the hero in Fuller’s film is you and me.

Shock Corridor is also vital and alive – a sweat-soaked 90 minutes that may veer into camp, but does so with a dedication to jackhammer overkill and sending a message with a groovy bass line and a chorus of appreciative euro-snaps. Give it a look now that it’s been released by Criterion on a sharp DVD showcasing Stanley Cortez’s (The Magnificent Ambersons, Night of the Hunter) crisp-as-a-new-sheet cinematography with a surprisingly clean print.

Gonzo cinema at its finest, Fuller at his angriest, and B-movie that matters - it’s groovy, baby, cool.






Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: DVD