Shock Corridor (The Criterion Collection) (1963)

Alternately brilliant and infuriating, Samuel Fuller's Shock Corridor is without question a one-of-a-kind film. Shot in black and white in 1963, it tells the story of a newspaper reporter who's convinced he can win the Pulitzer Prize if only he can penetrate the inner sanctum of a mental hospital to solve a murder that's been committed there--something the police have apparently not been able to accomplish.

The bizarre juxtaposition of intensity and immaturity, anger and pulp, outrageousness and illogic tells you that this is the work of a film maker who's not afraid to take chances. Fuller seems to be deliberately trying to rattle or irritate the viewer: a stripper sings a slow torch song and only partially disrobes, a nuclear physicist prattles like a six year old, a 300 pound man sings the same opera aria repeatedly to awaken another man. It's not hard to tell that the dialogue is defiantly pulpy, with emphasis on "defiant". Fuller was obviously enraged with the more destructive qualities of American culture and let his audience know it in no uncertain terms.

But with the pulp--and how much more pulpy can you get than the reporter's girlfriend being a stripper?--there's also startling power. A war veteran relates his dreams of living with South American primitives, brought shockingly to life with a rare color sequence. A black man spouts virulent anti-black racial epithets and dons a makeshift KKK hood, chasing another black man down a hallway. The reporter himself wonders why, at crucial moments, he's unable to speak.

A scathing attack on the relentless American drive for success, power, and acceptance, this movie, for all its frequently dated, semi-trashy dialogue, ranks as one of the best films of its time or any period in American history. The ruthless, downbeat ending--the murderer is discovered, but at a terrible price--is a fitting, bitter conclusion.

A reporter seeking a Pulitzer Prize cons his way into being committed to an asylum to get the story on an unsolved murder case. Peter Breck (from TV's "The Big Valley") is good as the reporter. He blends in with the other male inmates trying to ferret out the facts but discovers insanity is nothing to toy with. Constance Towers (also in Fullers' "The Naked Kiss") is a stripper and his loyal girlfriend who notices Breck's mental deterioration on her visits. She tries but can't get him out. He has more or less sealed his own fate. The portrayals of the other inmates are powerful and there are some real doozies locked in with Breck. But I found the movie to be so vivid that it was almost unpleasant to watch. The scenes in the asylum are disturbing. The scenes outside the asylum are depressing and even Towers' strip routine at the nite club where she works is downbeat. Breck's plight is overwhelmingly doomed. This is without a doubt a challenging film but I can only recommend it with a warning. If you are emotionally affected by films be careful with this one. It will linger with you after you've seen it. Still it's a powerful and unusual film worthy of a cult following and a collector's item.

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Shock Corridor (Samuel Fuller, 1963)

With all the hefty heaps of praise that have been lavished on Shock Corridor during the past decade, as Sam Fuller's films have been rediscovered by critics, I admit I went into it thinking it was going to be on a par with the second coming of Christ. Ah, the perils of reading too many reviews before actually seeing the film, which in this case is a B-grade melodrama, a cautionary tale that reminds me in many ways of Reefer Madness or the like, but about the perils of ambition. Perhaps another part of my problem is that I've watched two other classic hubris tales this year, both of them superior, Alexander MacKendrick's Sweet Smell of Success and Billy Wilder's Ace in the Hole; compared to those, Shock Corridor comes up desperately short.

Like MacKendrick's Sidney Falco or Wilder's Chuck Tatum, Fuller's Johnny Barrett (Peter Breck) is a newspaperman looking to make a name for himself; over the vehement objections of his girlfriend Cathy (Constance Towers), he hatches a plan with his editor to have himself committed to a mental institution to solve the murder of an inmate the previous year. The only witnesses to the crime were three other inmates, and the police can't get anything out of them; Barrett figures that if he pretends to be one of them, he can get more information out of them. He's right, but as Cathy suspected, being in the nuthatch seems to be rubbing off on Johnny Barrett in the worst way.

And, you know, it's the idiocy of that central premise, that insanity is contagious, that really bugged me about this movie. It probably wouldn't have bugged me so much were it not the central premise of the movie (and it wouldn't have made itself known as the central premise of the movie had it not been hammered home so hard in the opening scene). There is a lot to enjoy about this flick, as long as you take it in that same campy way in which you'd watch something like Night of the Lepus; it's got a streak of black comedy a mile wide, some really amusing characters, and all the weepy fifties melodrama you can shake a stick at, even though it was made in the early sixties. But oh, the neanderthal-level stupid that sits at the core just gets to me, and keeps me from being able to look at it in the lighthearted manner I'd need to to really just sit back and enjoy it. **

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I remember the first time I saw this film. I'd heard a lot about it beforehand, but wasn't sure how it'd be portrayed on screen. I also had the good fortune of seeing on the big screen. From the first scene on I sat there with my eyes and my mouth wide open. It's such an amazingly powerful film, based largely on factual events and people Fuller had talked to this doesn't mean it's by any means a true story, but what really grabs you is how you can see and understand how real all the issues he talks about were (and unfortunately still today are).

It's a kinetic, visceral experience, and the only film that has moved me like PSYCHO did, the first time I saw it. The colour sequence just made my spine vibrate. His vision is bleak, the film and acting can be crude, but the raw power it has will simply obliterate any such resistance. God, what an experience!

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Ambitious journalist Peter Breck lusts after a Pulitzer Prize or, at the very least, "a book, a play, even a movie sale." So what's a starving, scheming, modestly talented scribe to do? Why, according to Shock Corridor, he ought to get himself committed to a loony bin to grill the crazies who witnessed an unsolved murder, crack the case, then cinch his immortality by exposing to the world the venality and corruption of yep, you guessed it--The System. "I'm scared this whole Jeckyll/Hyde idea is going to make a psycho out of me," warns Breck's stripper girlfriend, Constance Towers. A shrewd guess, since such watch-the-cast-go-psycho classics as this, The Snake Pit, The Cobweb and the Caretakers, exist only so actors can shred, chew and swallow the scenery. Early on, we're treated to Breck rehearsing his "part," the better to get him committed. He and Towers are so hilariously hammy in their abusive-brother-and-victimized-sister act, it's surprising that the loony bin doesn't book 'em both.

The fun really kicks into high gear when writer/director Samuel Fuller locks Breck inside what has to be the Movies' All-time Greatest Ward of Bad B-Actors. You'll drop your jaw when Larry Tucker, as a 300-lb. wife-killer, bellows operatic arias in our hero's face while the poor guy's trapped in bed; later, Tucker tops this bit with a scene where he actually force-feeds Breck chewing gum. You'll shake your head in disbelief, too, when shell-shocked James Best sets an early standard for Jack Nicholson-style over-the-top theatrics by Method-acting himself into delirium while reliving Civil War battles. And you'll cheer when the ward's bird-like schizo stares into the camera and socks over this immortal line: "I am impotent and I like it!" No self-respecting mad-house melodrama would be worth its weight in Thorazine without electroshock scenes--and this movie's are pips.

All the savage competition from the other hams finally unhinges Breck (and the movie, we might add). How can we tell that Breck's gone bonkers, you ask? For starters, there's his conjuring up, literally out of nowhere, Towers to chirp, "I need somebody to love"--her face covered in feathers, mind you--while gamely trying to bump 'n' grind. Then there's the inevitable ward filled with sex-starved babes: Breck wanders in with one of the best Bad Movie lines ever, "Nymphos!" Soon, as one of the femme-fatale inmates sings "My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean," the other women fondle Breck to a frenzy. There's more: watch for two of the nuttiest hallucination sequences in movie history, one consisting of what look to be home movies of Fuller's trip to the Far East, and the other a corker of a scene in which Breck sees a teensy Towers sashaying across his chest in stiletto heels, purring, "All the men want me, Johnny... and you, you want the Pulitzer Prize!"

Sad to say, by the time Breck cops the Pulitzer, he's too nuts to realize it. But you'll know, and by then you'll agree with us that this madcap madhouse movie belongs way, way up there in the Bad Movie pantheon. The single craziest thing about Shock Corridor is that it was judged by some critics to be among the best movies of 1963. What we don't know is how many of them were committed as a result of viewing the film.

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