Shock Corridor represents filmmaker Samuel Fuller at his most excessive, but few would have it otherwise. Peter Breck plays a ruthless journalist who believes that the quickest way to a Pulitzer Prize is to uncover the facts behind a murder at a mental hospital. To glean first-hand information, Breck pretends to go insane and is locked up in the institution. While pursuing his investigation, Breck is sidetracked by the loopy behavior of his fellow inmates. During a hospital riot, Breck is
straightjacketed and subjected to shock treatment. By now almost as crazy as he's previously pretended to be, Breck begins imagining that his exotic-dancer girlfriend Constance Towers (a Samuel Fuller "regular") is actually his sister! Typical of the Fuller ouevre, the characters in Shock Corridor are either saved or destroyed by their individual obsessions. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi
Borrowing an idea from a little-seen Budd Boetticher thriller, Behind Locked Doors (1948), Shock Corridor runs with it, going into crazy, angry places and finishing up as one of Samuel Fuller's greatest masterpieces.
Filmed in Fuller's cigar-in-your-face style, it is a sober but deeply satirical depiction of a modern asylum, in which the patients are clearly intended to remind one of various American political and social philosophies.
Welcome to the bizarre world of Samuel Fuller - where a black man is the Imperial Wizard of the KKK and being locked in a room full of hot nymphomaniacs is a 'bad' thing.
January 18, 2009
Randy Tippy
Super Reviewer
A journalist has himself committed to a mental institution to try to solve a murder. This mix of lurid melodrama, heavy-handed symbolism (America in 1963 is an insane asylum!), and nympho assaults shouldn't work at all, but Sam Fuller's passionate direction turns it into something maddeningly entertaining.
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