Last Sunday, after a week spent immersing myself in the solemn, rigorous austerity of Robert Bresson's A Man Escaped, I posted my review of Criterion's recent Blu-ray release of the film. As loaded as that disc is with illuminating supplements on Bresson's principles of cinematographe, and through the sheer power of his arrogant confidence in his methods, I was easily converted to champion his cause and adopt, if only for the sake of a column, his condescending attitude toward conventional cinematic methods. Attracted to the purity of the Bressonian vision, in which all the non-essential theatricality and vulgar sops to win audience approval are stripped away, I found myself poised to delve back into Bresson's filmography, and from there, perhaps explore with renewed zeal some of his antecedents, like Dreyer, or Ozu, following the lead of Paul Schrader who wrote a famous book about that trio of directors. Out with all artifice, melodrama, sentiment and hokum! Let's whittle away that winking cleverness, the garish spectacles, superfluous sight gags and crude emotional manipulation, in order to apply our artistic talents to create films that touch those viewers discerning enough to truly see and feel with a more subtle but profound sensibility.
Later in the evening, I undid all that by popping Shock Corridor into my video player.
Except for the absence of a genuine "movie star," I'm not sure that I could have selected an art film more fundamentally un-Bressonian than Shock Corridor, one of the last two films made by Samuel Fuller in the Hollywood phase of his career, just before his iconoclasm and persistence in exploring provocative new territory apparently became too difficult for the studio system to handle. (Quite ironic, considering all the upheaval that the movies were about to go through in the latter half of the 1960s.) In this film, as in practically all his others, Fuller employs professional actors, contrives snappy dialogue, uses camera tricks, jarring visual effects, simultaneously panders to and provokes our baser instincts, and injects unrealistic, arbitrary plot twists in order to force a reaction and make his unambiguous point. Not only that, the film was conceived and shot very quickly, with occasional ham-handed edits and manic action sequences that reveal a "one take and done with it" aesthetic - all quite the opposite of Bresson's methodical perfectionism in which simple gestures and spoken words might be shot (no exaggeration) fifty times or more in order to realize precisely what the director had in mind. Shock Corridor gives every appearance of being a haphazard production, a low-budget, below the belt exploitation film hastily brought to completion and aimed at luring in the masses through promises of lurid titillation and giddy outrage, just for the sake of making quick money.
But there is, of course, much more to it than that.
Perhaps the thread of connection, thin though it may be, between directors like Bresson and Fuller is that they both pursued their artistic visions with little regard for compromise, and a strong intolerance of any interference from studio execs and other meddling nincompoops from outside their circle of trust. In that sense, and in the distinctiveness of their immediately perceptible styles, we can hang the label of "auteur" on both in a way that allows the word to signify something meaningful. Beyond that, it remains difficult to conceive of much that overlaps between their respective approaches to filmmaking. Even the story lines of these two films are a stark contrast to each other; in A Man Escaped, a condemned prisoner patiently designs an elaborate plan to break himself out of a locked facility for the sake of his life and freedom, while in Shock Corridor, a news reporter concocts a ruse designed to help him gain admission into a securely guarded institution, to pursue a goal of professional self-promotion and vain ambition. But both movies do use peephole shots.
Back to that theme of conceited ambition... it's the motive that drives struggling but determined beat reporter Johnny Barrett to develop a scheme aimed at fooling the psychiatric staff of a mental hospital into thinking that he's really sick in the head. Johnny wants to generate the misleading diagnosis because he smells a promising story in the case of an unsolved murder. A patient confined to the hospital died from stab wounds not too long ago, but nobody knows who did it. The only witnesses to the event are three men, each of whom are delusional and psychologically incompetent. What law enforcement and hospital regulators were unable to discover, Barrett feels confident of finding out for himself, if he can only infiltrate the asylum, win the trust of the witnesses and get them to talk. Once the murder mystery is solved, all Barrett has to do is write up a juicy account of his undercover adventures and voila, the Pulitzer Prize is sure to be his!
That pursuit of the Pulitzer makes Shock Corridor a cousin of sorts to Billy Wilder's Ace in the Hole (1951), a variant on the theme of the reckless, striving newspaperman who compromises his ethics in pursuit of a big story that will catapult his career to a new level. The opportunistic set-up taps into that expectation of self-made greatness drilled into many young American men as a core motivational principle, to go out there and win in whatever competitive arena life happens to thrust them into. As is often the case though, Johnny has to work through resistance from the woman in his life, who doesn't like the heavy risk he's taking - in this case, wagering that his sanity will remain intact over the months of confinement and treatment it may take to break the story. Cathy wishes he could accomplish his goals in a more conventional manner, even though she's taken on a job as a night club stripper to make better money than she could in more traditional lines of "women's work." But Johnny isn't one to settle for mediocrity - he has to put it all on the line - big time or bust, that's the gamble.
Cathy's part is acted, rather demonstratively, by Constance Towers, a tall, classy blonde whose most prominent roles prior to the two films she made with Fuller were under director John Ford. In an interview included on the disc, Towers recounts her first meeting with Fuller at a cocktail party where he first proposed casting her in one of his films. She comes across as a smart, elegant woman of sound education and upbringing who was a good sport in taking on the challenge of breaking out of the "prim and proper" persona that her poised mannerisms and Ford's casting had locked her into. Here, beyond the obligatory strip dance routine (once her occupation was mentioned, you just know we have to see her in action), she's asked to fluctuate between the portrayal of two identities locked up into one character: the first, as Johnny's lover, the other, as his make-believe sister with whom he's incestuously preoccupied, a symptom of the perversion that he mimics in order to gain access to Shock Corridor and the patients who hold the answer that he seeks.
Fuller's portrayal of the causes and behaviors associated with mental illness admittedly hasn't aged well. If one is at all interested in viewing films that offer an insightful study of that aspect of the human experience, I wouldn't suggest this one. You're better off with Bergman than Fuller in that regard. Here, the concept is that "insanity" is a kind of refuge from the terrors and traumas of life, a false identity that one takes on in order to escape the dreadful entrapment imposed by a real identity based on one's own actions and shaped by the external pressures that accompany our various roles in society. Underlying the notion of assumed personalities that characterizes each of the individualized characters among the patients in Shock Corridor (besides those who just lurch and stagger around the hallway as extras) is a Freudian concept that sanity collapses when the mind cannot withstand overwhelming stress. There's nothing all that scientific or even realistic in the dramatized explanations provided about how these characters went off their rocker, but that's only of secondary importance, as Fuller's higher aim is to confront American society and reveal it as a madhouse of much larger and even more barbaric proportions than what we see going on within the institutional confines.
These stereotypical cliches of "contagious" mental illness offer additional convenience to the plot, as we see insanity portrayed as a state one can slip in or out of due to environmental conditions, almost on a moments notice. It's what creates the dangerous tension for Johnny as he associates for hours, days, weeks on end with the sickies, forced to summon all his strength of will to keep the howling demons of madness at bay. And it provides the opening for his witnesses to find their all-too-brief moments of lucidity in revealing their clues, before once again lapsing into the fog of an airtight schizophrenia that has them convinced they're somebody that they're not.
Even more primal, and most definitely relevant to the majority of Shock Corridor's viewers, is the undulating thread of sexual jealousy and insecurity that permeates Johnny's quest for the Pulitzer. He could have chosen any kind of deviant behavior to create his alibi for admission... but he went with incest, even to the point of asking his girlfriend to pose as the sister that he's obsessed with and on the verge of raping, if he hasn't already. Putting the woman you love in a horribly awkward situation like that for the sake of your career ambitions is a special kind of twisted, but then, it's only the degree of artifice, not necessarily the severeness of the cruelty, that distinguishes Johnny's scam from the routine exploitation that many men inflict on the women in their lives. Despite Johnny's attempts to exert control over Cathy, he found himself tormented by her memory, her image (significantly, in her stripper outfit), and his worst imaginings of how she might be keeping herself busy in his absence.
On top of all that, Johnny's choice created circumstances of peculiar intensity and challenge. Surrounded by fellow patients who are grotesquely obese, crippled by shame into inadvertent celibacy, contentedly neutered and sexless ("I am impotent, and I like it!") or, on the other end of the spectrum, helplessly incapable of resisting their carnal urges ("Nymphos!"), Johnny has a tough gauntlet to get through to keep his libido functioning in a healthy way.
He harbors powerful, unresolved erotic anxiety over Cathy's role in his life, unclear as to her true nature and motives: is she at heart an exhibitionist stripper who gets some kind of a thrill flaunting herself on stage in front of a bunch of mouth-breathing Neanderthals? Or is she who he thinks she is, a brainy intellectual who's merely saving up for a tranquil domesticated future? Can she be both? Might she be neither?
As I read Johnny, it's the sexual insecurity and angst that take their toll on his fragile ego, not the supposedly contagious mental diseases or barbaric psychiatric interventions, if we require an explanation as to what the most plausible driving force for Johnny's subsequent breakdown. But perhaps that was the track he was already on in his relationship with Cathy, whether or not he ever allowed himself to be hospitalized.
Shock Corridor also offers rich, blunt and memorable commentary on prominent political issues of the day there were indeed ripped directly from the current headlines. Racial segregation, lingering neo-Confederate resentment harbored by adherents to overblown notions of militaristic honor and valor, and unbridled nuclear apocalyptic Cold War paranoia all get their turn to twist at the end of Fuller's skewer as he shines a bright, hot and unrelenting light on the absurdity of those right-wing bugaboos that, having mutated this way and that over the past fifty years, still manage to seep into and pollute the public discourse of our own times.
As we learn in The Typewriter, the Rifle and the Movie Camera, a 1996 documentary on Fuller's life and work that accompanies last year's edition of Shock Corridor, the director was a true master of storytelling who used various media throughout his career to convey his powerful and provocative messages. Starting as a copy boy in a New York City newspaper room, he tried his hand at cartooning, urban journalistic reporting, wartime correspondence, short stories, novels, screenwriting, and directing, succeeding with increasing degrees of proficiency with each new discipline he adopted. He even did a bit of acting here and there, becoming quite a beloved character in his biggest role of all, as Sam Fuller, the cigar chomping, charismatic gadfly whose quick wit and broad experience of life gave him an anecdote to relate for any occasion and the brash bravado to casually override whatever delicate sensibilities might have inhibited others from telling some of those stories in full detail. The doc is a fine primer and overview of Fuller's career, utilizing clips from nearly all of his films to create a compelling character arc of the man himself. Perhaps more importantly, the documentary demonstrates the ongoing resonance of Fuller as an archetype for contemporary American directors of the auteurist sort. It features extensive commentary from Martin Scorcese, Quentin Tarantino and Jim Jarmusch on the influence that Fuller had on their work, and even contains some geek-dream footage of Tarantino, Jarmusch and actor Tim Robbins rummaging through Fuller's garage, loaded as it is with personal memorabilia and scattered relics from so many of the movies he made over the years. In shifting our focus from a story told by Fuller to the impact made by the storyteller, the supplement brings all the way around, "fuller" circle we might say, as we recognize that in a way, Shock Corridor was quasi-autobiographical. The author of the story did indeed plunge headlong into a crazy house known as the USA, made acquaintance with its inhabitants, witnessed both their bouts of madness and the occasional breakthrough of clarity. The main difference was that, unlike Johnny Barrett, by no means did Samuel Fuller ever lapse into mute insanity. Indeed, he never lost his voice, or his focus. It's just that eventually, the authorities made it difficult for him to be heard.
Next: Hands Over The City