Shock Corridor
Samuel Fuller’s “Shock Corridor” gets to the insanity of America, the craven need for fame of journalists, and what happens when they collide. This movie is fairly relevant now, and it’s depressing that this is the case. A lot of things would be different now, with the advent of the internet and social media, but this is a film that looks at America’s obsessions, and sees madness.
Fuller was a journalist before he turned to filmmaking, but he has a natural feel for the medium. Story, set pieces, character build-up and narrative flow; journalism and filmmaking are not dissimilar, it’s just that filmmaking illuminates truth through fiction. Johnny Barrett (Peter Breck) is a character who’s trying to do the same thing; he’s a reporter who, in hoping to win a Pulitzer Prize, gets admitted to a mental institution. He’s hoping to solve a murder in the institution, and with the help of a psychiatrist (Philip Ahn) and his girlfriend (Constance Towers), he gets in through a terrible lie, and ingratiates himself with the population.
The visual aspect of “Shock Corridor” is striking. Shot by Stanley Cortez (with Fuller doing the dream sequences in color), the mostly black-and-white cinematography has the look and feel of film noir, with shadows overtaking the frame in a way that emphasizes the duel nature of these characters- their faces, and the dark sides the institution is enabling by not necessarily treating but observing. We get to know a few of the other patients- namely, alleged witnesses to the murder. One thinks they’re a Confederate soldier, but in one vulnerable moment, memories of their time in Japan in WWII comes through. Another is a Black man who thinks they’re a white supremacist; in one of the film’s most startling moments, he claims to invent the KKK- and has even used his pillow case to create his own mask- he spouts hatred and vulgarities before leading the other inmates in an attack against one of the other Black inmates.
Fuller’s film is about how the politics of the ’60s was driving wedges into the American psyche, and that we, the People, were responsible for it. Barrett is the perfect representation of this. He has decided that, for his own success, he must act like a crazy person. And, through his own choices, his view of the world- and his life- gets skewed, and the life he’s pretending about becomes his truth. He still attempts to go through with his attempts to solve the murder, but the longer he stays, the harder it is for him to hold on to reality. The final witness Barrett must confront is a former nuclear scientist who went crazy; Barrett thinks he gets the truth out of him, but by then, can he even hold on to what reality is? Released two months before the Kennedy assassination in 1963, and before our modern conspiratorial age, Fuller was warning audiences about falling down the rabbit hole. Sixty two years later, we still haven’t taken his warning to heart. That’s not unexpected, given how surreal the world around us has become.
