While I was working my way through the films of the 1950s, I got used to a certain amount of casual racism and bigotry in American films, especially when it came to war and crime pictures. A notable exception was the work of Samuel Fuller, who was committed to promoting racial equality and social realism in his work. Non-white actors had opportunities in his films that were scarce otherwise, and his willingness to tackle controversial material often raised eyebrows and spooked the studios. Many of his later films were produced independently without much support, though he had his devoted fans - notably among the French New Wave filmmakers.
"Shock Corridor" had its origins in a script that Fuller wrote for Fritz Lang in the 1940s, influenced by Fuller's own stint as a crime reporter. The film plays like a sensationalistic exploitation flick at times, full of lurid images and insinuations, as our journalist hero, Johnny (Peter Breck), pretends to be mentally unsound to infiltrate a mental hospital and investigate a murder. He claims to have incestuous thoughts for a made-up sister, in actuality his stripper girlfriend. At one point, he stumbles into a roomful of nymphomaniac women, who proceed to maul him ravenously. The climax of the film sees him suffer a full blown mental breakdown, and he's dragged off by orderlies while he howls, clutching at the furniture with his fingernails. There's no sign of grounded realism here.
However, once Fuller has the audience where he wants them, the social commentary rears its head, and it's fierce. He reveals that many of the patients in the hospital have been driven to madness by various social ills of the 1950s and 1960s. Here is a disgraced Korean War POW, who imagines that he is a Confederate general to escape the shame of being branded a traitor. Here is a black man, so traumatized by his work as a Civil Rights activist that he believes he's a member of the Ku Klux Klan. Here is a brilliant scientist, who has regressed to childhood innocence because his work was used to create weapons of war. It's the farthest thing from subtle, but it's impactful and daring, given the era when the film was released. The images of the black patient, Trent (Hari Rhodes), delivering his passionate rants against integration, are still jarring and disturbing to this day.
You can feel Fuller purging his frustrations from his own time as a soldier in the Korean War, that were touched on in his earlier war films like "The Steel Helmet," but never expressed with so much bitterness and anger. This time he didn't have to compromise his message, and the metaphor was clear: America was the mental hospital, and its damaged residents were the victims of American society, American institutions. The nymphomaniacs and Johnny's stripper girlfriend - who couldn't be explicitly referred to as such - would presage the heroine of "The Naked Kiss," where an ex-prostitute struggles to escape the stigma of her checkered past. As for Johnny, his ego and his hubris doom him to a broken psyche and a broken worldview.
"Shock Corridor" was made when Fuller's career was in its decline. It was produced by Allied Artists Pictures Corporation, a smaller studio that churned out lower budget B-movies, pulp pictures, and action fare. There wasn't much of a budget for the film but Fuller had complete artistic freedom and ensured that it didn't lack style. The expressionistic lighting, the dream sequences shot in color, the surrealistic electroshock therapy montage, and the over-the-top performances gave it a heightened, baroque quality. Critics at the time were mixed, but the film made money, and quickly became a cult favorite for its deeply cynical views and bold approach to the material.
What I've Seen - Samuel Fuller
The Steel Helmet (1951)
Park Row (1952)
Pickup on South Street (1953)
Run of the Arrow (1957)
Forty Guns (1957)
The Crimson Kimono (1959)
Underworld U.S.A. (1961)
Shock Corridor (1963)
The Naked Kiss (1964)
The Big Red One (1980)
White Dog (1982)
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