Shock Corridor

Samuel Fuller, USA 1963, 101 mins

Reporter Johnny Barrett (Peter Breck) hatches a scheme to get himself committed to the local mental asylum in order to solve a murder that occurred there and, in the process, get a scoop that will win the Pulitzer Prize he covets. Barrett's stripper girlfriend Cathy (Constance Towers - Fuller's wife at the time) is worried about what might happen to him if something goes wrong but eventually agrees to go along with his scheme.

Having got into the asylum Barrett sets to work, subtly questioning the other patients for information. But it's difficult to be a sane man in an insane place and the atmosphere of the shock corridor' proves to be infectious. The closer Barrett gets to the truth, the closer he gets to insanity. Maybe he's going to end up staying longer than he had planned.

Remember that tagline for Ed Wood - "he made films like no-one else"? Well, the same could be said of Sam Fuller. Director and often writer and/or producer of his films, Fuller was a true auteur, whose idiosyncratic "tabloid" or "American primitive" style has become an acknowledged influence on countless contemporary directors, from Godard to Wenders to Tarantino. Here Fuller brilliantly plays upon exterior and interior contrasts (the asylum/the outside world; the patients' minds/the outside world) until his shock corridor finally becomes a microcosm of 1950s America.

To know what Fuller's about you really have to see his films. Where else would you find a black man who thinks he's a Ku Klux Klansman, spouting off white racism? Or the bold visual conceit of using (colour) footage from a different film, shot in a different aspect ratio, as a means of conveying a paranoid fantasy?

I can't recommend Shock Corridor, or Fuller's films in general, highly enough. Go see it, and if it whets your appetite seek out his kinky western 40 Guns (1957), with Barbara Stanwyck as "a high riding woman with a whip", or the dementedly sleazy The Naked Kiss (1964).

Keith H. Brown
EUFS Programme 1998-99