#733) Shock Corridor (1963)

The Plot: Determined to win a Pulitzer Prize, reporter Johnny Barrett (Peter Brent) gets himself committed to a psychiatric hospital to solve the murder of one of its inmates. Once Johnny adjusts to life on the inside, he befriends three patients/witnesses (James Best, Hari Rhodes, and Gene Evans), but struggles to get their accounts of the murder while navigating their respective mental illnesses. As Johnny’s investigation continues, his girlfriend Cathy (Constance Towers) worries about the toll this is all taking on Johnny’s mental health. It’s an edgy examination of the collective mental illness that is America from one of Hollywood’s maverick filmmakers.

Why It Matters: The NFR describes Samuel Fuller’s filmography as “edgy and unseemly” with “breakneck storytelling and central characters who defy easy categorization.” As for the film itself, the NFR highlights the work of cinematographer Stanley Cortez and editor Jerome Thoms.

But Does It Really?: Every so often, the NFR likes to induct what I call a curveball movie: a movie that is such a drastic departure from the kind of films normally associated with the NFR that all I can do after my viewing is say “What the fuck did I just watch?” “Pink Flamingos” is a good example, as are a number of the Registry’s more avant-garde shorts, but before any of them, there was “Shock Corridor”. I didn’t necessarily like “Shock Corridor”, but its unapologetic outrageousness definitely left an impression on me, which is more than some of the movies I’ve covered here can say. In addition to its – well – shocking subject matter, “Shock Corridor” joins the NFR as representation of legendary director Samuel Fuller. A yes for “Shock Corridor” on the NFR, but will someone please tell me what the fuck I just watched?

Everybody Gets One: Samuel Fuller started off as a copyboy and eventually crime reporter for the New York Evening Graphic. This experience, along with his Army service during World War II, would heavily influence his later film work. Initially starting his showbiz career as a writer, Fuller was not happy with Douglas Sirk’s direction of his script “Shockproof” and wanted to direct his own movies, a level of creative control he could only get from the cheaper Poverty Row studios in Hollywood. We’ll see more of Samuel Fuller’s gritty, offbeat filmography when I finally get around to watching “Pickup on South Street” and whenever I can track down “V-E + 1”. This is also the only NFR appearance for pretty much the entire cast, who were primarily TV actors. Peter Breck was best known at the time for playing Doc Holliday on “Maverick”, while Constance Towers would eventually gain fame as Helena Cassadine on “General Hospital”.

Wow, That’s Dated: Everything. Ev-er-y-thing about this movie, from its medical jargon to its Cold War paranoia, is so dated it’s a wonder it still works at all. You could not, nor should you, remake “Shock Corridor” today.

Title Track: Fuller wrote the original screenplay of “Shock Corridor” back in the 1940s under the title “Straitjacket” (not to be confused with the unrelated 1964 Joan Crawford movie “Strait-Jacket”). Filming began as “The Long Corridor” before Fuller changed the title to the more provocative “Shock Corridor”.

Seriously, Oscars?: No Oscar nominations for “Shock Corridor”, but it did win a handful of international film festival prizes. Despite his lengthy filmmaking career, and probably due to his outsider status, Samuel Fuller never received an Oscar nomination.

Cathy: “Johnny, you’ve got to be crazy to want to be committed to an insane asylum to solve a murder!”

Johnny: “Every man wants to get to the top of his profession. Mine is winning the Pulitzer Prize.”

There’s your set-up and your motivation in two lines of clunky dialogue.

• What an odd concept for a movie. I can’t really elaborate on that: it’s just weird. Like, how in hell do you even come up with that idea? Also, I know that poking holes in this movie is a pointless exercise, but I’m doing it anyway: If you are going to infiltrate a mental institution, why not work with the institution and let them in on it rather than trying to fool them too? Granted, if Johnny had done that either a) they wouldn’t have cooperated or b) the movie would be far less interesting.

• Yes, Peter Brent has a generic ‘50s leading man look about him, and when he’s pretending to be insane his acting is borderline Shatnerian, but he is clearly relishing his chance to star in a movie. Breck might have been too dedicated to this film because shortly after filming wrapped, he was hospitalized for exhaustion.
• As for the film’s leading lady, Constance Towers doesn’t have a lot to do but stand on the sidelines and exclaim things like “Johnny, no!” It’s a bit much, but with this kind of over-the-top material you can see how Towers succeeded in the world of daytime drama. Side Note: Every time, and I mean every single time, a character in a movie is named Cathy, all I can think is “Aack!”
• Say what you will about this movie, at least Fuller was ahead of the game with diverse casting. Right up front we get Korean American actor Philip Ahn as Dr. Fong. Longtime readers may remember Ahn for starring alongside Anna May Wong in fellow NFR entry “Daughter of Shanghai”.
• Whatever I was expecting from this movie, it didn’t include a musical number. Between Cathy’s striptease performance (the aptly named “Cathy’s Song”) and her later fantasy appearances in Johnny’s dreams, parts of this movie feel like they were directed by David Lynch.

• I don’t know anything about mental institutions, but I assume “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” is a more accurate depiction.
• Shoutout to the actors playing the two orderlies: Chuck Roberson (John Wayne’s longtime stunt double finally showing his face to the camera) and John Craig (who kinda looks like if Bill Hader played a young Orson Welles)
• Johnny’s roommate Pagliacci is played by Larry Tucker, who would go on to co-write “Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice” with his comedy partner Paul Mazursky, which earned them both an Oscar nomination. Also, despite his character being named Pagliacci, the song he sings throughout the film is “Largo al factotum” from “The Barber of Seville”.
• Another future TV star in the cast is James Best as Stuart, the patient who thinks he’s Confederate General J.E.B. Stuart. Best would go on to play Sheriff Coltrane on “The Dukes of Hazzard”, which, like this movie, also prominently features the song “Dixie”.
• There’s a weird scene where Johnny accidentally enters the women’s ward and is attacked by, in this movie’s parlance, “nymphos”. I get the minor plot point that this scene serves, but I found it all unsettling. Though I’m sure that was the point.

• Another thing I was not expecting to see in this movie: Color! Two of the patient’s flashbacks are color footage Samuel Fuller shot for earlier film projects: the footage of Japan is from his 1955 film “House of Bamboo”, while the Brazil footage is from his unfinished film “Tigrero”. The color footage was clearly shot for a widescreen process (in this case, Cinemascope), with the image being squished to fit this film’s smaller aspect ratio. I don’t recall the Great Buddha being so skinny.

• Hari Rhodes deserves a medal for his performance as Trent, a Black patient who think he’s a White supremacist. Rhodes somehow maintains his dignity even as his character spouts some nasty racial slurs. It’s like if Chappelle’s “Clayton Bigsby” sketch wasn’t played for laughs. With this hateful rhetoric, however, Trent could successfully run for elected office today.
• One thing I’ve learned about movies is that if your protagonist is trying to find a mystery figure, odds are it’s someone who has already been introduced in the movie. In this case: the murderer is someone in the hospital we’ve already met. No spoilers, but during my viewing I narrowed it down to two characters: One obvious choice and one less obvious but more interesting choice. Thankfully, Fuller went with my latter guess, although I wasn’t keeping track of character names, so when Johnny learns the name of the murderer, my first thought was “Which one were they again?”
• For the record, the 1963 Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting went to Oscar Griffith Jr., editor of the Pecos Independent and Enterprise for its expose on Billie Sol Estes, a businessman whose fraud schemes were connected to the US Department of Agriculture. To the best of my knowledge, neither Oscar Griffith Jr. nor any of his reporters got a job with the Department of Agriculture to write the articles.

• Along with the rest of Samuel Fuller’s filmography, “Shock Corridor” got a reevaluation in the late 1960s, where it gained traction with the European auteur crowd. Fuller continued to write and direct his own movies, as well as act in films by such luminaries as Jean-Luc Godard and Wim Wenders, through the 1980s, and enjoyed mentoring younger generations of filmmakers. Samuel Fuller died in 1997 at age 85.
• Among the list of film directors who cite Samuel Fuller as an influence are Steven Spielberg, Quentin Tarantino, Jim Jarmusch, and Martin Scorsese, who paid homage to “Shock Corridor” with his 2010 film “Shutter Island”.

• According to IMDb, there’s a 1997 movie called “Asylum” with Robert Patrick and Malcolm McDowell that, while not a direct remake of “Shock Corridor”, seems to follow the same major story beats. I’m guessing there’s a reason you’ve never heard of “Asylum”.

• But seriously, what the fuck did I just watch?