User Reviews

To describe SHOCK CORRIDOR as lurid would be an understatement: it plays like something torn from a supermarket tabloid. An ambitious reporter feigns madness and has himself committed to an insane asylum in order to investigate a recent and unsolved murder--and once inside he encounters everything from hateful attendants to a whole ward of crazed nymphos, and all the characters are presented in the most explotational tone possible.

But SHOCK CORRIDOR has a lot more going for it than just lurid exploitation. Director-writer Sam Fuller was renowned for his gutsy, no-frills, straight-to-the-point style, and in his hands SHOCK CORRIDOR becomes a vision of America as a society that places so much emphasis on conformity and success that people crack and go mad under the strain. And Fuller's cast is remarkable: even when the story goes ridiculously over the top, they perform with such sincerity, conviction, and realism that you can buy into the story in spite of its improbabilities.

SHOCK CORRIDOR will not be to every one's taste, but even those who dislike it will probably find themselves grudgingly fascinated by the film, and although the film transcends such labels fans of explotational and cult cinema will also find lots to enjoy. A classic of its kind. Recommended... but don't say I didn't warn you.

Gary F. Taylor, aka GFT, Amazon Reviewer

Shock Corridor is one of Samuel Fuller's wildest works, a deeply personal examination of insanity by the premier exponant of 50's and 60's Pulp Cinema. I prefer "The Naked Kiss", but "Shock Corridor" certainly stands as a unique and memorable work. It is silly, no downright ludicrous at times, as seen today, but this must have been strong stuff when it came out in 1963. It boldly takes on such topics as incest, racism and cold war paranoia. Not sensitively, mind you, yet quite boldly!

Every scene in this movie seems to be played at fever pitch, and I have to say I believe its been over-rated critically, due to the auteur theory run amok, but I do admire Fuller's gutsiness and directorial skill. If only his skills as a scenarist and dialogue writer were commensurate! He did, however, certainly know how to pull an intense performance out of an actor. Breck and Towers are rather ridiculously intense at times, as a matter of fact, though forgivably so, as they are instruments of their director and express his style perfectly. Hari Rhodes, who people of my generation may remember from the tv series, "Daktari", gives a terrific supporting performance, as does the memorable Larry Tucker, who later became a Hollywood screenwriter and producer.

This is one experience I'm not likely ever to forget, it is truly unsettling. One of the most ferocious, savage and disturbing films I have ever seen, and brilliant cinematic art on top of it.

Ambitious reporter has himself admitted to a mental hospital in order to solve a murder there. He poses as an incestuous brother to his 'sister' and real-life stripper girlfriend, and once inside gets to talk to all three witnesses to the murder. Gradually, though, his own mind starts to disintegrate ...

Was there ever an asylum like Samuel Fuller's? Hope not. One of the inmates is singing the Factotum Aria from 'Barber of Seville' around the clock, another savours the words "I am impotent and I like it", but they are the sanest ones. Of the three witnesses one imagines himself to be a general at Gettysburg but suddenly shifts and claims to be a Communist in reaction to "my folks (that) fed my bigotry for breakfast and ignorance for dinner" in a long pathetic virtuoso solo by actor James Best. One, a young black man, dresses as a Ku Klux Klan member, advocating white supremacy, expressing his loathing for blacks ("Oh, they're alright as entertainers, but ..."), and the third, a Nobel prize winner, has retreated into infantilism.

'Shock Corridor', which obviously turned out to be a cult favourite, directed by maverick independent filmmaker and former journalist Samuel Fuller, makes no excuses for itself, and its style is swaggeringly confident, blending pulp and downright tawdriness with high melodrama and noir, in unforgettable, dramatically lit images. Sometimes it's plain silly in its excessive irony, at other times searing in its empathy, and probably the most funny moments are those when the reporter (a wonderful Peter Breck) once more asks his increasingly absurd and irrelevant question, "Who killed Sloane in the kitchen?", and when he finally learns who, he forgets about it immediately! I cannot recommend this film enough, it is one of the great works of art of American cinema. No less.

A tale of irony in the vein of EC comics, Shock Corridor is Samuel Fuller's work of genius and far ahead of its time. Fuller pulls some absolutely great performances out of his cast. Everyone delivers the goods. Each character is so wild and outlandish while the actors playing them still maintain believability. Peter Breck is outstanding in the lead. All of the patients are either hysterically funny or scary funny, from Stuart (Rosco P. Coltrane in a memorable role) on down to Pagliacci. But the real standout in the movie is Hari Rhodes in the role of Trent, the white supremecist. His flawless performance disturbs me (you'll know if you've seen the movie). He could be the best actor ever. What else can I say about this movie, it's an insanely perfect pulp piece. Shock Corridor is an unreal experience, film noir at its best, and truly a cult movie.

Samuel Fuller's direction helps keep SHOCK CORRIDOR watchable but the script is never valid enough to make the film anything more than an interesting experiment that is only half successful.

PETER BRECK does a good job as a newspaper reporter with only one thought on his mind. ("Who killed Slade in the kitchen?"). He goes undercover at a mental institute in order to uncover the truth. His girl friend CONSTANCE TOWERS agrees to help get him get incarcerated on the pretense that he's her brother and tried to rape her.

That premise alone is hard to make believable the quick succession of events that lead to Breck's being shoved into a psycho ward. Director Fuller lets the camera discover several other rather interesting patients but none of them are fully developed as characters we can care about.

Without revealing the disturbing ending, let me just say you're liable to get hooked into watching the film if you happen to catch it from the start. It's worth a watch, if only to see where all the story strands are going.

But when it's all over, you have to wonder whether anyone can really take the story seriously. Good try though--and Breck really gives his all to his volatile bursts of temper.

The striking thing about this film is just how unnervingly barmy the characters are, and even more amazing is just how they seem so apt with Sam Fuller's sledgehammer direction. Written, directed and produced by Fuller it weaves a cautionary tale of how faking madness just might bring about the downfall of ones own sanity, and here it begs the question of if the price of fame has no boundaries to those who clamour for glory ?. The film cleverly manages to make the viewer think about the thin line between sanity and insanity and this is shot with such style it lingers long in the memory after the credits role. Some great sequences allied with clever switches to {almost surreal} color make this more than a curiosity piece because of the directors "American Primitive" reputation.

Interestingly dark 8/10.

How we should read this movie?

Is it really important to know why a famous psychiatrist could have helped the journalist to get into the asylum? Is it really important to have a realistic, tied up scenario in this movie?

I don't think so, and what really comes out of it is a wild political message that ultimately depicts the madness of the outside, normal society, and how it deals with everything that is different. To me, the director's intent is to tell us how sick our society is (at least, "was", at his time) and, for that, he chose the metaphor of madness, and very specific characters to tell us the message. The main characters are the mad guys, and the journalist and the crime are only excuses to lead us into this outside world of rejected people. The scenario structure seems to be rather simple and rounded as any political speech, so after we enter the asylum, we are presented to the mad characters (the war veteran, the black guy, the physicist), one by one. The only exception to this straightforward scenario line is the journalist girlfriend, but her appearance shouldn't have a different direction (in the critical, political sense), and she gives us a really funny, sexy, and ridiculous scene where the hollywoodean love is ridiculized (she is performing her daily striptease, at the same time we know she's suffering from love, note how the scene is shown in a cold, distant and downward camera).

Definitely, it is a political-pulp-fiction. As such, a good movie.

Just don't try to see it as a standard Hollywood movie.

Shock Corridor is like and not like other movies about the patients of a 'cuckoo's nest'. There's nothing the audience is going to necessarily learn about mental illness or about why the murder journalist Johnny Barrett (Peter Breck) is investigating is so crucial for him to commit himself into an asylum (or "mental home" as one orderly puts it). That's not exactly what Samuel Fuller- well-known B-film writer/director is out for. What he does come away with is an exploitation film that finds itself as being, well, remarkable. Somehow, the material finds itself as inspired for practically all the way.

As Barrett learns who the patients are, such as Larry Tucker playing Pagliacci (the big guy with a song sometimes in his head and mouth), James Best as Stuart (an ex-soldier who thinks he fought in the confederacy), and Hari Rhodes playing Trent (a black guy who takes himself seriously enough to, oddly, get heard out by the rest of the inmates at times). This, plus the cold orderlies and doctors, the nymphs, and just about all the others in the place, begin to wear Barrett's mental capacity down as he gets closer and closer.

For the players involved here, it's a character actors' feast- for a B-film every performance comes off as being believable, so much so that each performance has a level that's startling, immediate, and immensely theatrical. If one was to just watch the theatrical trailer without seeing the film one might come away with a different impression about how it turns out. Fuller's script is loaded with moments, grand and minute, of satire and the bizarre, and it fits. His direction as well creates an atmosphere that changes as much as some of the patient's mind-sets: scenes go from being rather funny (drop-dead a couple of times) to chilling and ridiculous to observant, not to mention surreal (i.e. the scenes in color, plus some of Barnett's inner monologue) and musical.

Though the film does have minor liabilities, to be expected, such as a less than great ending (expectable for the genre), and some flaws in the editing. But that shouldn't deter viewers who may want to get into the career of Samuel Fuller and aren't too sure where to start. Overall, Shock Corridor is a high quality, value exploitation flick that leaves a heavy impact on repeat viewings. A+

Well, I have to say that I'm really surprised at this film. After reading up about it and seeing all the high ratings, I was really hoping that it would be something special. Unfortunately, however, Shock Corridor is only a faintly interesting little film with some good ideas that mostly aren't capitalised upon. In 1946, Mark Robson made a film about a sane man in a mental asylum called "Bedlam", and Shock Corridor is not a patch on that superior film! The plot takes in similar themes to your classic 'selling your soul to the devil' kind of story, as at the centre there is man prepared to put himself on the line for hope of winning some glory. Johnny Barrett is a reporter working for a top newspaper. There's been a murder in the local nuthouse and all attempts to get information out of the prisoners have been unsuccessful, so Johnny decides that he will fool the psychologists into thinking that he's insane so he can gain access to the asylum, talk to the residents and hopefully manage to solve the mystery…all hopefully leading him to the Pulitzer prize.

The film gets off to a good start as we see the details of the plan unfolding and the way that the lead character's girlfriend slots into the plan and her problems with it...but once the plan has played out, the film really take a turn for the worse when he's finally committed to the insane asylum. It would seem that director Samuel Fuller (who had a varied career, which was topped by the fantastic White Dog) didn't really know what he wanted to do with the film. There's not a great deal of investigation going on and the film focuses more on the insanity of the inmates, which doesn't work well if you ask me. It would seem that the director wanted it to be 'trippy', but I found it boring - there's plenty of fights and things, but I was really hoping for some sort of murder investigation and that's not what I got – once he enters the asylum, the only real point of interest is a scene that's in colour! The acting is not very good either, Peter Breck never impresses in the lead role and constantly looks awkward, and his support is not of the high class variety either. Overall, Shock Corridor is a film that could have been good but unfortunately it isn't!

I have watched hundreds and hundreds of movies in my life ranging from mainstream Hollywood to highbrow arthouse favourites to schlocky cult classics but I can honestly say I have never experienced anything quite like 'Shock Corridor' before! In fact the only other movie off the top of my head that mixes b-grade melodrama, subversive social comment, hysterical camp dialogue, and genuinely inspired shots and scenes is 'The Naked Kiss', Sam Fuller's next movie. Fuller was an oddball original, and if you want to see why he is worshipped by Godard, Wenders, Scorsese, Tarantino and Jarmusch look no further than this astonishing movie which has to be seen to believed! Peter Breck (best known for his role on TV's 'Maverick') plays an ambitious reporter who fakes a mental illness so that he can solve a murder, gain fame, respect and (hopefully) a Pulitzer prize. His girlfriend (Constance Towers, star of 'The Naked Kiss', also essential viewing) warns him against it, but is convinced to aid his plan by posing as his sister and getting him committed. Once inside he becomes involved with all kinds of crazies including the larger than life Opera loving nutcase Pagliacci (writer Larry Tucker in an absolutely unforgettable performance), wardens both kind and sadistic, and in one sensational scene a bunch of raving nymphos! ( "oh no! nymphos!"). However describing the basic plot of this movie gives you only half the picture. You really have to watch it for yourself to fully appreciate just how strange it is. For my money it ranks with 'One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest' and 'The Ninth Configuration' as the most memorable movie dealing with madness, and on top of that it is one of the greatest b-grade movies of any genre ever made. Arguably Fuller's single greatest achievement and a movie not to be missed by any film buff. Highly recommended!

Agree with most of the comments made here about the film. Fuller comes up with some imaginative film techniques to keep this low budget effort watchable. While it is silly on a large scale, it is notable for some of its social commentary. To have the black patient at the asylum spouting the same kind of racial epithets that you could hear espoused by some of the white politicians of the era makes you more fully aware of the level of insanity at which their fearmongering arguments are made. Nice touch in an otherwise overly manic effort. Compare this with "Twinkle, Twinkle, Killer Kane" or "The Ninth Configuration" -- another 'inmates in the schlock corridor' movie which had its own brand of social commentary.

A journalist, determined to expose a murder, gets himself thrown into the mental hospital in which it occurred. While there, he has to fight to retain his sanity. This exposé and the murder, they're McGuffins. The film's biggest flaw is that these McGuffins are left so untouched (does Barrett actually believe that anything he might prove by interviewing mental patients will stand up in court?), which makes the allegorical part of the film stand out a bit too much. Fortunately the allegory is powerful and is well done. Amazingly, these major criticisms of American society, delivered in monologues by three very good performers, exist in this film, made in 1963. The tightness of the post-WWII generation was weakening a bit at the time, but the kind of things that are expressed here, exposing the paranoia and bigotry and the belligerence of the American hoi polloi, it's daring. I suppose it was allowed because this was obviously meant to be an exploitative B-movie and play to a small audience. Shock Corridor is probably most famous for its style, and that fame is very much deserved. The harsh lighting is gorgeous, as is all of the cinematography, in general. The choppy editing, probably influenced by the French New Wave that was taking place at the time, is also rather good. The acting is adequate. It's certainly not an actors' film, and the leads are easily forgettable. However, some of the inmates give good performances. Hari Rhodes as Trent is probably the most memorable. He plays the first black student at a Southern university (not the historical one, but a fictional composite). He was driven insane by the bigotry around him, and now he thinks he's a Grand Dragon of the KKK (and he thinks he invented it). The film does fall into that mental hospital movie of giving all the inmates wacky problems. I don't know of any earlier mental hospital movies offhand, so maybe this set that trend. In this film, it's not nearly as annoying as it is in movies like One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, which was, despite Shock Corridor, the parent of movies like Girl Interrupted and The Princess and the Warrior. 9/10.

This is a strange, effective movie, hampered by a B-movie look and a substandard (obviously non-union) cast. Interesting story about a journalist who goes to an insane asylum to uncover a murder and ends up with a permanent bed. Moments of realism, interestingly fast and unmatched editing (unmatched shots, use of color stock footage to illustrate insanity!). Lots of shlockey situations, though, and ultimately we can't get to into his situation because the story didn't ground his character or the relationship with his girlfriend enough before he got into the asylum. Nice photography as usual by Cortez.

Some might regard this as propagandistic, Marxist, a garrulous sermon. I perceive it as one of the creative summits of Samuel Fuller's incomparable career, a masterpiece of subversive and incisive cinema. Here, Fuller transforms a relatively straightforward yarn into a sociological allegory, a violent and Kafkaesque dystopia that threatens to collapse under the strain of seemingly infinite tensions. Above everything, this is a film that attests to Fuller's inexhaustible courage and fidelity to truth, as well as his singularly fierce intellect.

The asylum here, of course, is a thinly-veiled metaphor for America at large, a police state touting phantom ideals of democracy and equality. The inmates are the detritus of the American dream, those rendered unfit for the Darwinist struggle of capitalistic life. Some, like the jaundiced altruist Dr Boden, have opted for a flight from reality, and it's hard to blame him when reality constitutes the absurd oneupmanship of the Cold War. Others have retreated from a climate of hate and xenophobia- African-Americans are driven to self-loathing (one thinks of Fanon and Sartre's "The Anti-Semite Makes The Jew") and wayward Bible Belt youths are unable to reconcile their idealism with the zealotry of Southern fundamentalism and bigotry. Indeed, how "mad" are these folks when juxtaposed against a reality obsessed with nuclear armament, murder, racial purity, sex (Cathy betrays her intellectual aspirations for a well-paying stripper job) and the like? Seen in this light, absconding from reality seems like the only sensible option.

Though Fuller satirizes Freudian essentialism and psychological determinism throughout the film, lampooning the jargon and inauthentic categories that are used to assimilate, institutionalize and dehumanize these wretched victims, he seems to fully endorse the post-Freudian constructivism of psychoanalysts like Erich Fromm and Karen Horney, who further developed Freud's "metapsychology" and theories on neurosis as a social product. The inmates here are the "discontents" of Freud's civilization, the miscreants and deviants expelled from the ratrace.

Fuller has never been shy about his indictments, and the didactic thrust of this film is plain- his America facilitated the production of such "neurotics", and their removal from society was legitimized and justified simply on essentialist myths of perversion and degeneracy. The greatest scene in the film, Johnny's encounter with the haunted Trent, yields a timeless insight (feel free to castigate me for horrid paraphrasing): "I don't blame the white kids, they've been taught since they were toddlers to hate us colored folk". The legacy of the South for Trent is a heritage of brutality, proliferated ad infinitum, to the point where he is turned against himself and consumed in neurotic self-hatred, a stranger to himself.

In characteristically fearless fashion, Fuller debunks and deconstructs madness as a manufactured, socially-enforced mythology- a sane Johnny gradually becomes trapped in his role as madman. Sundered from voices that will affirm/confirm his lucidity, he assumes the identity mirrored to him by his situation. This is Fuller's horrifying commentary on the tentativeness and fragility of identity- social recognition is bestowed and revoked by the society we live in, it is impossible to construct and maintain it without the sanction of everyone else. Our normative notions of "madness" and "reality" do not exist a priori, they are erected and agreed upon by the civilization we inhabit. Each of the characters in this film must grapple with a host of irrealizable chimeras, the mirages of meritocracy and the "self-made man" being but two.

This fluid conception of identity is profound, but what is even more interesting is Johnny's ambiguous character- are we to read him as a man in dogged pursuit of truth in the face of censure and hypocrisy (his loss of voice being yet another bald metaphor on Fuller's part), or as a monomaniacal neurotic whose arbitrary 'truth' (in this case a sordid obsession for murder and making said murderer answer to contemptible 'justice') blinds him to the nightmares that afflict his fellow inmates? One must think of the goal that impels him to this undertaking in the first place- the Pulitzer Prize. Again, Fuller identifies the inadequacies of a society that quantifies success in concrete terms, where all and sundry slave under the yoke of money, titles and awards.

Sure, there are complaints that may be levied against this film. There are no likable characters, for one, unless you take kindly to the maudlin and mawkish Cathy. Yet, the more I meditate on this film, the more I am convinced that it is one of the most powerful films I have ever seen. It is decidedly less "pulpy" in feel than most Fuller I have seen, and assuredly one of his wisest productions, one that remains germane to our times as a diagnosis of capitalistic ills. Though the Cahiers crowd revered Fuller, I am certain that this packs more of a punch than Godard's entire corpus of work. Complex, visionary and incredibly rewarding, this one will sear your retina and quicken your pulse.

If you ever get a chance to see this film on TCM or Netflix, then by all means give it a chance. You might find it as entertaining in a low camp sort of way as I did. Its writer-director Samuel Fuller was known for making low-budget films with controversial themes, and the film is described as a thriller, but I found it (presumably) inadvertently funny. The acting is way, way over the top, and the plot is crazier than the patients depicted in the film's mental hospital. The recurring voiced thoughts of our journalistic hero, feigning mental illness and "working" undercover, so to speak, in the mental hospital to solve a murder committed in the hospital and achieve acclaim, are comically histrionic. I cannot believe the serious-minded and socially-conscious Fuller set out to make a satire, or expose the treatment of the mentally ill, or explicitly parade their delusions and idiosyncrasies for our amusement; instead, to this viewer, the film is less a thriller and more a kind of low camp amusement.

How else are we interpret the crazy scene where our hero searching for clues to the murder ends up in the "nympho" ward where they interrupt their art therapy to attack him amid his ferocious screams (and we see on the walls the results of their art therapy: pictures of naked men). On the other hand, one of the attendants is taking sexual advantage of "feeble-minded women" in the kitchen. And our hero's girlfriend expresses her anxieties that if he solves the crime he'll emerge from the hospital reasonably sane, but if he doesn't solve it, he'll descend to a permanent "depressive psychosis" (or was it "catatonic schizophrenia", they seem to mix the diagnostic disorders in this film frequently). Oh, what our ambition will make us do!

I must say I have some admiration for the commentators who saw just how ludicrous this thing is and still found something intriguing about it. To me it was a stultifying combination of overheated direction (the visual equivalent of Fuller's purple prose), ridiculous plotting, hyperventilating non-actors, and a garishly cartoonish view of the mentally ill (how about those nymphomaniacs! - only Fuller, and maybe Ed Wood, could try to play this scene with a straight face). The only redeeming quality in this mess is just how blithely unaware Fuller is of the "hard boiled reality" of the situation he is portraying. And to what absurd lengths he will go to to try to convince us of the veracity of this "world of madness" (one gets the idea he never felt he was going "too far"). Then again maybe that's what people admire about this picture in the first place. 4/10.