Shock Corridor

 Shock Corridor (1963) "produced, written, and directed by Samuel Fuller" as the credit assures us is this director maudit's masterpiece.  The film is astonishing and you should seek it out.  I'm not an enthusiast as to most of Fuller's movies -- they are tawdry, often poorly written, cartoonish, and visually undistinguished, although his films all contain interesting sequences in which sensationalist exploitation achieves a sort of flamboyant and campy majesty.  That said, most of Fuller's movies are afflicted with long stretches of expository scenes that are as flatly lit and unimaginatively staged as an episode of I Love Lucy.  Fuller's feature made right after Shock Corridor, The Naked Kiss (1964) although highly acclaimed by some critics is tedious with poorly written dialogue and excursions into maudlin and ridiculous sentimentality.  The Naked Kiss has a certain sophomoric cynicism -- poor prostitute goes straight only to discover that her fiancee is a child molester -- a surprising plot twist because inadequately motivated; this plot development feels like a trick on the viewer.  Shock Corridor is a horse of a different color, crazily inventive and gripping from first shot to last.  In Shock Corridor, Fuller's unique sensibility is harnessed to an excellent script and brilliant black and white camerawork by Stanley Cortez that completely transcends the schlock elements of the story -- here Fuller's sensationalism fuses perfectly with his camera effects and bizarre dialogue to produce a film about madness that is, itself, convincingly insane.  Further, Fuller's sermonizing, which is a flaw in many of his pictures, is penetrating and, even, profound as a diagnostic of certain social problems that the movie addresses.  Shock Corridor is a tour of Fuller's earlier films and obsessions; it's an account of American history as a febrile story of psychic pathology and madness. 

Fuller's movies, generally, begin with a figurative punch in the nose -- the audience gets slugged not because this has anything to do with the story but as a way of Fuller getting your full attention.  In Shock Corridor, a sweaty-looking psycho is babbling about how he loves stroking and caressing his sister's long hair.  The nut-case is about to pronounce himself a "sexual fetishist" but his Asian shrink discourages him from using the word "fetishist".  "It's a give away," the malign-looking shrink says.  Thus, we learn that the crazy guy, Johnny Barrett, is only feigning madness -- he's being coached on how to deceive a psychiatrist into thinking he's a hair fetishist with a desire to rape his own sister.  Barrett's girlfriend, a stripper in some sort weird semi-expressionist venue, has been recruited to play the madman's sister.  Barrett is a journalist afflicted himself with an idee fixe -- he wants to win the Pulitzer Prize by solving the case of a murder that took place in the locked ward of a local insane asylum.  His plan?  He will get himself arrested as a sexual pervert and committed to the closed ward and there he will investigate the killing and publish a newspaper article about what he discovers.  The stripper girlfriend, who Fuller films performing her act (she wiggles her ass and shimmies her tits and is such an untalented dancer that she looks like an idiot), opposes the idea as being too dangerous and degrading as well.  But Barrett and his editor and the shrink (Dr. Fong), persuade her to go along with the idea that is, itself, evidence of the hero's madness.  What could possibly go wrong?

Barrett pitches a fit when cops come arrest him on the complaint of his alleged "sister" (the ecdysiast girlfriend) -- she has gone to the police and, essentially, accused her boyfriend of raping her.  Barrett gets committed and finds himself in a scary, closed ward with brutal attendants and sinister orderlies.  There's Pagliacci, a huge fat man who tunelessly sings opera arias and crouches over Barrett as if buggering him.   Pagliacci tortured his wife to death by stabbing her as he regaled the dying woman with his off-key opera singing.  Another guy thinks he's Jeb Stewart, the Confederate general, who is constantly studying the battle of Gettysburg to figure out how to win the fight with Pickett's charge.  Jeb Stewart is a casual racist who responds enthusiastically to Barrett's claim that he is, himself, General Nathan Bedford Forrest, the Confederate officer who founded the Ku Klux Klan (Fuller gives us a learned disquisition as to the meaning of that name.)  The two whack-jobs salute one another.  After some probing, Barrett discovers that the victim of the crime, Sloan, was killed in the kitchen with a butcher knife and that three mad men witnessed the crime committed by a sadistic orderly.  One of the witnesses is presented marching behind a sign that says something to the effect that "Desegregation of Higher Education" is evil and that all "niggers should "go home."  When the man lowers the sign covering his face, we see that the madman protesting desegregation is, in fact, a handsome Black man who was driven mad by hatred of racist students and staff when he became the first African-American to matriculate into a previously segregated Southern college.  The Black Man attacks another dignified old African American gent crying out:  "Get him before he marries your daughter!"  We find out that Jeb Stewart became insane when he was captured by the North Korean commies and forced to become a Red himself.  Another mad man, Bodon was a great theoretical physicist, seemingly driven crazy by his complicity in producing the atomic bomb -- "he now has the mind of a six-years old", an orderly says. (Each madman is given in soliloquy, a sort of operatic mad scene in which they can expostulate on their insanity and it's causes.)  You can predict how this story will turn out, but Fuller's commitment to the nonsensical plot is "go for broke," relentless and utterly unconditional -- the director seems as mad as his characters.  Visually, the film is spectacular:  the stripper in her tight garments (my wife noticed that her crotch is clearly delineated in the form-fitting culottes) appears as a tiny figure, cartoonishly perched on Barrett's shoulder, more or less, and whispering sweet nothings in his ear; shadows gesture and posture, and there's a full-blown thunderstorm in the "shock corridor" -- they call it "the street" -- complete with lightning strikes and water pouring down from the ceiling.  The madmen howl and bay like dogs and there are fights over food and a full-blown race riot triggered by the African-American who hates "niggers."  In one scene that has to be seen to be believed Barrett flees an assault by entering a door that leads him directly into the clutches of the "Nymphos".  The "Nymphos", who are like Bacchae, hurl him to the ground and start eating him.  There's hydrotherapy, savage fights, and electro-shock treatment.  

In the film, Fuller seems to be touring his previous movies and alluding to the more garish aspects of those productions.  The poor Confederate soldier reminds us of the embittered O'Meara in Run of the Arrow and there are many references to the Big Red One, that is, Fuller's infantry unit that fought its way from North Africa to Sicily and Italy and, then, across Europe to Berlin.  The movie grows in interest the more you know about Fuller and parts of it might be baffling if you don't have some sense for the director's other, earlier movies.  But, even without that knowledge, this picture is stunning and something that you must see.