"Shock Corridor" (produced, written, and directed by Sam Fuller) has some passionate fans. I don't get it and think it is a pretty bad (thogh plenty hysterical) movie. I recognize that Fuller did a lot with little money--which admirable, but not enough to elevate him to the ranks of great directors. And he had a vision -- a criterion for subscribers of auteur theories for raising the evaluation of hacks into auteurs, even though it was a puppy, male-hysteric and/or paranoiac vision.

The 1963 "Shock Corridor" starts very, very slowly. And, as soon as the "Whodunit?" question arose (a third of the way through the movie's running time), I knew the answer.

The murder mystery is a pretext to show naked ambition pulling Johnny Barrett (Peter Breck overacting big-time) over the edge. In quest of a Pulitzer Prize convinces his (talentless) singer/stripper girlfriend Cathy (Constance Tower) to pretend to be his sister (hold onto your Freud, it's going to be a bumpy ride). He also convinces his editor (Bill Zuckert) and a physician friend (Philip Ahn) to collude in getting him in to the asylum where the murder suspect has been committed. Cathy tells Johnny that anyone who would get himself committed to a mental asylum to solve a murder has to be crazy. Whether former crime-reporter Sam Fuller agreed is an open question, but I agree with her.

In the central corridor of the asylum (which is called "the street," not "shock corridor") where inmates who have been behaving well are permitted to loiter, Johnny schmoozes, trying to learn the name of the killer. The three insane witnesses act out quite extremely, but have their lucid moments for the convenience of the plot and the prize-seeker. All three are as outlandish as, say, Barbara Stanwyck in Fuller's "Forty Guns." There is a nuclear physicist who has regressed to the age of six out of horror about The Bomb and the work he was doing on it (Dr. Boden was played by Fuller regular Gene Evans). The second of the three, Stuart (James Best) is a Southern died-in-the-wool racist. Stuart had been in the US Army in Korea, cracked, and espoused communism for a while. Now (the movie's present) he believes he is Confederate general Jeb Stuart. But the most extreme of the potential sources is Trent (Hari Rhodes), who was the first black student desegregating a Southern university. He thinks he is a Ku Klux Klan grand wizard, dresses in the sheets, and uses the n-word a lot. And, not a witness, is the helpful giant who sings tenor arias and has been engulfed by the tragic clown role Pagliacci (Larry Tucker)

The home-movie color footage from Korea, Amazonia, and some waterfall is bizarre. There's a whole lot of screaming and wild gesticulating, and the political aspects (the black and white victims of virulent anticommunism, virulent racism, the guilt of developing nuclear weapons, and the pressure to excel that cracks most of the characters, not least Johnny) are little more subtle than the screaming. (I read "Being Sane in an Insane Place" a really long time ago.)

There are other Fuller movies (Pickup on South Street, Steel Helmet, for instance) that I think are good, or at least entertaining (Run of the Arrow). Still, I have to say that Hari Rhodes's pathologically self-hating student who had integrated a school is very intense, and the cinematography was supplied by a master, Stanley Cortez (The Magnificent Ambersons, Night of the Hunter), with very sharp focus, some tight closeups, many oblique angles, and a lot of camera movement. Like most Fuller movies, there is some outstanding work, more than a little ineptitude, extreme (and extremely unlikely!) premises, but few doldrums.

The Criterion DVD has a cleaned-up print but is devoid
of extra features other than a trailer for the movie.)

------

I think that Fuller frequently went off the melodramatic deep end and sometimes shot klunkily bad and unbelievable scenes, but I also think that there was always something worth thinking about in Fuller movies. The others about which I have epined are:
I Shot Jesse James (1949)
The Baron of Arizona (1950)
Steel Helmet (1951)
Fixed Bayonets! (1951)
Park Row (1952)
Pickup on South Street (1953)
The House of Bamboo (1954)
Shock Corridor (1963)
The Naked Kiss(1964)


© 2007, Stephen O. Murray




Recommended:
No

Viewing Format: DVD
Suitability For Children: Not suitable for Children of any age