Day 19: Shock Corridor (1963)

Playing as the second film in our “Criterion Summer” double feature of Samuel Fuller pulp pictures, “Shock Corridor” is the darker of the two, losing the cheesiness found aplenty in “The Naked Kiss” and instead injecting itself with a level of surreal paranoia and cultural awareness to the issues of the early 1960′s. Even through its gritty pulp filter, we are given commentary on subjects ranging from journalistic integrity to race relations and even the atom bomb.

In “Shock Corridor” we follow Johnny Barrett (Peter Breck), a hard hitting reporter, who fakes his way into an insane asylum so he can get close to three inmate who are witnesses to the unsolved murder of another patient. Though his stripper girlfriend Cathy (Constance Towers of “Naked Kiss” fame) begs him not to trick the system, for fear he may lose his own mind, Johnny is determined that his discovery of the killer will lead him to a Pulitzer Prize and nothing will get in the way of that dream

And so, when finally imbedded in the asylum, Johnny seeks out the three witnesses- Stuart, a one time Communist, who now thinks he’s General Jeb Stuart of the Civil War, Trent, an African American “White” supremacist, who believes himself to be the leader of the KKK, and Boden, a one time worker on the atom bomb, who now holds the brain capacity of six-year-old. In one of these men lies the identity of the asylum’s killer and it will be up to Johnny to get it out of him- if he doesn’t go crazy first himself.

In the film, director and writer Samuel Fuller captures a singular moment of time, where changes in the world were at there peak, effecting the zeitgeist of everything. In 1963, as war continued over in Vietnam, the battle for racial equality gained a rallying cry after four innocents lost their lives in the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama. Two months later, President John F. Kennedy would have his brains scattered onto the streets of Dallas. And, amongst all the chaos, pop culture saw a renaissance with The Beatles releasing their first and second records, James Bond hitting the theaters in “Dr. No.”, and “Iron Man” and the “X-Men” making their first appearances in comic books.

1963 was a culture shift for the entire world and Fuller saw it coming, giving us a film that showcases that the origin of madness may not always stem from one individual but a whole cultural problem. We have Stuart, broken by war and taught to hate as a child, Trent, one of the first black students integrated into a white school, now despising (and even ignoring) his own skin color, and Boden, a man of science who cries out, “I don’t want to play anymore!” These three “crazies” are simply byproducts of a society that is eager to move forward but too stubborn to look back.

Interestingly enough, Fuller goes even further into making us understand the madness by showing the patients crazy illusions in bright color while everything else set in reality is shot in black and white. It is a shock to the system when color blazes across the screen after 45 minutes of gray tones and its almost as if we are suppose to fathom if these illusions represent something truer than the “reality” shown. Maybe they are closer to the real world than everything else. Maybe these crazies are not patients but victims- witnesses, not just of a singular murder, but to a whole way of life.

Maybe…just maybe.

To learn more about “Shock Corridor,” check out Criterion’s page here.

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