Shock Corridor [1963] Samuel Fuller

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Shock Corridor (1963)


http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0057495/

Subtitled in French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian

Shock Corridor is a 1963 film, directed and written by Samuel Fuller. The film tells the story of a journalist who gets himself committed to a mental hospital in order to track an unsolved murder. In 1996, Shock Corridor was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".

Peter Breck ... Johnny Barrett
Constance Towers ... Cathy
Gene Evans ... Boden
James Best ... Stuart
Hari Rhodes ... Trent
Larry Tucker ... Pagliacci
Paul Dubov ... Dr. J.L. Menkin
Chuck Roberson ... Wilkes
Neyle Morrow ... Psycho
John Matthews ... Dr. L.G. Cristo
Bill Zuckert ... 'Swanee' Swanson
John Craig ... Lloyd
Philip Ahn ... Dr. Fong
Frank Gerstle ... Lt. Kane
Rachel Romen ... Singing nympho

Johnny Barrett is a journalist determined to win the Pulitzer Prize at any price. He attempts to feign mental illness in order to become an inmate at a psychiatric hospital and investigate an unsolved murder case. His girlfriend, a professional stripper, poses as his sister and fabricates accusations of him sexually accosting her in order to have him committed. Inside the hospital, he attempts to interview three possible witnesses during their rare moments of lucidity: a veteran who was brainwashed during the Korean War and branded as a Communist upon returning home; an African-American who couldn't bear the strain of being a symbol for integration; and a nuclear physicist who retreats into the world of childhood rather than participate in the greater madness of the arms race. However, as the investigation unfolds Barrett finds himself losing his grip on his own sanity. Can he solve the case before he loses his mind altogether?

The two experiences that marked Samuel Fuller (1911-1997) most deeply were his service as an enlisted man in the First Infantry Division ("The Big Red One") during World War II and his earlier work as a newspaper copy boy and later crime reporter. Not surprisingly, several of his films draw upon these two aspects of his life for subject matter: war films such as The Steel Helmet (1951) and The Big Red One (1980) and films dealing with journalists such as Park Row (1952) and Shock Corridor (1963). Fuller, who often wrote and produced as well as directed his own films, insisted that film was above all a medium for personal expression; his independent stance and his bold, go-for-the-throat filmmaking style influenced French New Wave directors, especially Jean-Luc Godard, who even used him for a cameo as himself in Pierrot le fou (1965). His instincts as a reporter drove him to seek out sensational subject matter; not only was he one of the first directors to deal with the Korean and Vietnam wars, he frequently addressed the problem of racism in American society in his films, culminating in the little-seen and misunderstood White Dog (1982). At the same time, films such as Park Row and Forty Guns (1957) are stunning virtuoso displays of style, with complex crane and tracking shots lasting for several minutes.

Shock Corridor was the first of two films that Fuller directed for Leon Fromkess and Sam Firks under the auspices of Allied Artists, the second being The Naked Kiss (1964). Fuller described the inspiration for Shock Corridor as follows: "When I was a reporter I was taken into a ward for the insane by a cop and he tried to pull a joke on me and lock me in there. And I considered doing a story in this setting for some time, an expose. The insane are very interesting--because they are a lot like you and me. Most people are a lot closer to this than they want to believe. So I came up with a story, with the reporter. There was...a famous female reporter who made a big expose of the insane asylum on Wards Island by pretending to be insane. So I had this. And then there was the timing. At that time in the United States there were many things happening, big changes, people tearing each other apart, and I thought I could represent some things about the country, how it was like an insane asylum. You had the black and white thing. You had the war veterans who deserted. You have the man like Oppenheimer, with the A-bomb."

The film was produced under severe budgetary limitations; for instance, the long hospital corridor that makes up the centerpiece of the film was considerably shorter than it appears. At the far end hung a painted backdrop, with midgets pacing back and forth in the background in order to force the illusion of depth. While the film lacks Fuller's trademark long takes, it does feature Expressionistic lighting by Stanley Cortez (1908-1997), famed cinematographer of The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) and The Night of the Hunter (1955). Cortez, whose reputation in Hollywood was damaged by the notorious cost overruns on Ambersons, was forced to work on low-budget exploitation films at this stage of his career; some of these films include The Navy vs. the Night Monsters (1966) and The Ghost in the Invisible Bikini (1966). However, his cinematography for Sam Fuller on this film and The Naked Kiss is among the best of his career, especially considering the budget and technical constraints under which he was working.

One of the most immediately striking features of the film is its use of color inserts during the dreams and hallucinations of the inmates. The Brazilian footage was shot on location by Fuller while doing preliminary work for a film entitled Tigrero. Fuller recalls: "I had a story set in the Matto Grosso, among the Jivaro. It was about a tiger hunter and there's a story with a husband and wife. I stayed with the Indians there for six weeks. I was their guest. These were head-shrinkers and they shrunk a head for me and I filmed it. Wayne and Tyrone Power would have done the pictures, but the studio couldn't get the insurance to take the stars into the jungle. They couldn't leave Rio. They thought it was too dangerous." The story behind this project has been recounted in the 1994 documentary Tigrero: A Film That Was Never Made. The Japanese footage was shot by Fuller while working on the film House of Bamboo (1955). In both cases the 16mm color footage is anamorphically squeezed, adding to the surreal quality of the episodes. For the version shown on TCM, the original color sequences have been restored as Fuller intended.

Gene Evans (1922-1998), one of Fuller's favorite actors after his brilliant work in the role of Sergeant Zack in The Steel Helmet, recalls playing the character of Boden for Shock Corridor: "That was a difficult character. Sam called and said, 'I don't know anybody else who can do this part.' He didn't have any money, but it didn't make any difference--I would have done it for nothing, anyway. It was difficult to get that character just right. It needed a hell of a transition. The guy was like a child one moment and then all of a sudden there's an about-face and he starts talking physics, the A-bomb, scientific stuff. A hell of a switch. And unless it came off swimmingly it was going to be bad. And I had broken my finger just before I did it. I was in a fight in a joint down on Melrose, near Paramount. I hit a guy just as hard as I could hit him, and he went down and got right up. And I went running to get out the door, because I didn't need any more of that guy. And I had busted a finger from when I hit him. I went to a clinic and they put a sling on it, but Sam said, 'You can't work with that on. That looks ridiculous.' So I took if off and after a couple of days I've got a bent finger. And Sam says, 'Well, that's what you get for going out fooling around.'" Evans also worked with Fuller in Park Row and Hell and High Water (1954).

A film as sensational and stylistically outrageous as Shock Corridor was bound to alienate many critics upon its release. The reviewer for Variety writes, "In Shock Corridor, writer-producer-director Samuel Fuller apparently is trying to say something significant about certain contemporary American values. The points are sound and have merit. But the melodrama in which he has chosen to house these ideas is so grotesque, so grueling, so shallow and so shoddily sensationalistic that his message is devastated." On the other hand, A. H. Weiler, a film critic for the New York Times, praised the performances as "hard, driving and realistic." Today Shock Corridor has become one of Fuller's most admired and frequently revived works.




Here is an honest, visionary, pulp film, stripped of all romanticism, with characterizations and themes more real and relevant today than ever. To watch Shock Corridor now is to experience the complex, wacky, full-blown masterpiece of one of Hollywood’s great originals, Samuel Fuller. This one is a shoo-in for Best American Film of 1963.

To catch a killer and win a Pulitzer Prize, reporter-hero Johnny Barett (Peter Breck) has himself committed to a state mental institution. He must find out Who killed Sloan in the kitchen? by questioning the three inmates who witnessed the crime—men driven crazy by the hypocrisies of the American Dream relating to racism, anti-communism and the bomb.

Fuller adopts the time-honored convention of the journalist’s quest for truth by structuring his exploration of psychic damage in America. As the film unfolds, though, the purity of the hero’s mission is undercut by his own monomaniacal ego, and the delusions of omnipotence that mask the darkest secrets of his soul. In Breck’s moving performance, Johnny becomes one of the great doomed figures of modern day film noir—unwittingly pursuing a killer at the expense of his own sanity.

Fuller, by sheer force of style, energy and storytelling ability, directed seventeen films, all low-budget, in Hollywood between 1949 and 1965. Before that he had been a crime reporter, novelist, infantryman, and screenwriter. Fuller made memorable westerns (Forty Guns, Run of the Arrow) noted for their modern psychology and thorny thematics (Fuller sees racism and sexism throughout history as both a driving force and the greatest flaw in American society). His war pictures (Steel Helmet, Fixed Bayonets!, Merrill’s Marauders) and crime stories (Underworld U.S.A., Pickup on South Street) are energized by the raw intensity of his characters and his clear-eyed reportorial perspective. His one newspaper movie, Park Row, is exhilarating fun and breathes Fuller’s authentic knowledge of the trade. He sees war—in low-budget dramatic terms—as the emotional tension that inevitably explodes among small groups of men forced together in claustrophobic, inhuman situations. “In war, men become animals,” says Fuller.

Constance Towers (The Naked Kiss, Sergeant Rutledge) co-stars as Johnny’s stripper girlfriend who tries to warn him of the danger of his plan. The three madmen are played to the hilt by James Best, Hari Rhodes, and Fuller stalwart Gene Evans. Certainly, no one can forget Larry Tucker as Pagliacci, the 300 pound opera-singing looney who befriends our hero on his quest. Photography is by Stanley Cortez (The Magnificent Ambersons, The Night of the Hunter) but Fuller himself shot the color dream sequences in 16mm (restored for the first time in many years for the original Criterion laserdisc release in 1989).

“It is the artistic force with which his ideas are expressed that makes his career so fascinating . . .” wrote Andrew Sarris. And Fuller’s career certainly reached full force with his last two “Hollywood” films,The Naked Kiss (1964) and especially Shock Corridor.

“We have to imagine Fuller’s characters as being fundamentally divided, split personalities,” writes Thomas Elsaesser on Shock Corridor for the Edinburgh Film Festival Tribute to Fuller in 1969. “They experience a kind of symmetry between the situations and dilemmas imposed upon them from without, and the contradictory nature of their own secret drives . . . . At a certain point in a Fuller movie the convergence of external and internal necessity becomes axiomatic: what makes the heroes act so violently is the intolerable reflection of an intolerable inner dilemma . . . . For in the pursuit of the Sloan murder, Johnny is groping for his own identity.”

This microcosm of America-in-an-insane-asylum that Fuller created in 1963 has lost none of its force for a viewer in 1998, and his treatment of journalistic hubris foreshadows the contemporary problem of media becoming corrupted by its all-too-compliant association with the powerful elites of government today. You get all this—plus an attack by nymphos, multiple beatings, a striptease number, and assorted electro-shock treatments—contributing to the film’s no-holds-barred melodrama.