Shock Corridor
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Shock Corridor
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This film has been preserved in the National Film Registry in 1996.
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Shock Corridor is a 1963 American psychological thriller film starring Peter Breck, Constance Towers, and Gene Evans. Written, directed and produced by Samuel Fuller, it tells the story of a journalist who gets himself intentionally committed to a mental hospital to solve a murder committed within the institution.
Why It Rocks
- With the film industry essentially falling apart at the end of the 1950s, and Samuel Fuller's marker and budgets shrinking, he needed story angles he knew he could sell to theater owners. He was also competing with filmmakers like Roger Corman and William Castle who could crank out youth-oriented films on miniscule budgets. Fuller's films were pitched to a slightly different audience, older males with a taste for exploitation. Shock Corridor promised its audience almost everything an exploitation title could offer in 1963: sex, drugs, violence, and of course insanity. Filmmakers had been using mental illness as a subject since the dawn of cinema; in fact, it’s hard to think of a movie villain who isn’t unbalanced in some way.
- Fuller may have been influenced by Ken Kesey’s novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’ Nest, which had been published the year before.
- In his script, the director used a journalism angle to bring viewers into an asylum. The film opens with a deception, as a psychiatrist and Johnny Barrett, a newspaper reporter, role-play parts in a scheme to trick state doctors into accepting Barrett as a patient. Fuller opens up the scene to reveal two other observers: Barrett’s boss, and his girlfriend Cathy, a stripper filled with foreboding about his plan.
- Fuller barely bothers to reveal the actual premise of the film—that Barrett is going undercover into the asylum to solve an unsolved murder by questioning three inmate witnesses. As the title suggests, the goal of the film is to shock viewers, something a straightforward murder investigation was not going to do. Fuller concentrates instead on a simplistic, clichéd, but admittedly exciting view of asylum life, one with hydrotherapy, shock treatments, and, behind an unlocked door, nymphomaniacs ready to pounce en masse on unsuspecting males. But Fuller’s ideas, interesting in the abstract, could seem ludicrous when worked out on the screen.
- The film's theme of America-in-an-insane-asylum that Fuller created in 1963 is just as relevant today, and the director's 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.
- Stanley Cortez's cinematography and inventive lighting helped deal with the project’s budget limitations. He adjusted shadows to make the same set look like two different offices, for example, or altered the tone and meaning of a scene simply by using a high or low camera angle. For a film with no exteriors, Cortez managed to vary the visuals enough to keep them interesting.
- The movie's mostly a tool to explore one of Fuller's most consistent themes, that of the insanity of the supposedly sane, civilized world. The three inmates who witnessed the murder each gets a soliloquy in which we ostensibly learn about their backgrounds and what drove them to mental illness in the first place. But they're really more like editorials each designed to highlight a distinct madness infecting the human race: war for Stuart, racism for Trent and the quest for nuclear dominance for Boden.
- Peter Breck provides a moving performance, that makes Johnny one of the great doomed figures of modern day film noir—unwittingly pursuing a killer at the expense of his own sanity.
- Editor Jerome Thoms amped up the hysteria with quick cuts that create a montage of disturbing behavior, violent outbursts, and dream sequences.
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