Samuel Fuller is not at the top of his game with "Shock Corridor," but it still certainly is something to see. The premise is fairly contrived and never even that clearly explained: Peter Breck plays a journalist with his sights set on a Pulitzer Prize, who fakes mental illness, gets committed to a mental hospital and tries to solve a murder that took place there and was witnessed by only three inmates. Breck begins to lose it himself, and the ultimate irony is that by the time he solves the murder, everyone thinks his revelation of the killer is simply the babbling nonsense of yet one more crazy inmate.
Fuller's writing is weak here, which is unusual for him. I didn't buy that Breck would be driven insane himself. And the character of Breck's girlfriend, played by Constance Towers, gets nothing but melodramatic suffering scenes to play as she tries to convince those involved in the little scheme on the outside to call things off. The tempo of the film, too, gets monotonous after a while. The constant freak-out scenes and the jangling soundtrack all become too much.
But, Fuller is so damn audacious as a filmmaker, and his visual style gives you so much to look at, that you'll probably be fascinated despite the film's weaknesses. The whole thing looks like a lurid and pulpy film noir, and in most respects he uses sound in compelling ways, as when an Italian-opera-obsessed inmate is belting out a nearly unrecognizable version of an opera song at the top of his lungs, and then the actual song in full orchestra bursts on to the soundtrack so that we can hear it as he's hearing it in is head.
The movie mainly serves as 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, racism and the quest for nuclear dominance. In this respect, "Shock Corridor" is very much a product of its time, but manages also to be sadly relevant today.
So an uneven film overall, but I land on the side of recommending it, because as long as Samuel Fuller is at the helm, I can guarantee you'll never be bored.
Grade: B
Fuller's writing is weak here, which is unusual for him. I didn't buy that Breck would be driven insane himself. And the character of Breck's girlfriend, played by Constance Towers, gets nothing but melodramatic suffering scenes to play as she tries to convince those involved in the little scheme on the outside to call things off. The tempo of the film, too, gets monotonous after a while. The constant freak-out scenes and the jangling soundtrack all become too much.
But, Fuller is so damn audacious as a filmmaker, and his visual style gives you so much to look at, that you'll probably be fascinated despite the film's weaknesses. The whole thing looks like a lurid and pulpy film noir, and in most respects he uses sound in compelling ways, as when an Italian-opera-obsessed inmate is belting out a nearly unrecognizable version of an opera song at the top of his lungs, and then the actual song in full orchestra bursts on to the soundtrack so that we can hear it as he's hearing it in is head.
The movie mainly serves as 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, racism and the quest for nuclear dominance. In this respect, "Shock Corridor" is very much a product of its time, but manages also to be sadly relevant today.
So an uneven film overall, but I land on the side of recommending it, because as long as Samuel Fuller is at the helm, I can guarantee you'll never be bored.
Grade: B