Shock Corridor, written, produced, and directed by Samuel Fuller, is one of the most challenging scripts to execute. However, Fuller’s talent for writing taut screenplays and his technical mastery in low-budget filmmaking propel the film to the ranks of the best psychological thrillers ever made.
The film is about an ambitious journalist named Johnny Berrett (Peter Breck), who is following a story about a murder at a psychiatric hospital that he believes will get him his Pulitzer Prize, something he has coveted for his entire life. To solve the case, he infiltrates the hospital by successfully faking his insanity despite the objections of his girlfriend, Cathy (Constance Powers), who is against the idea. As he begins his investigation, he discovers three patients witnessed the incident and decides to question them individually. Stuart (James Best), the first witness, was brought up by a southern sharecropper and taught bigotry and hate from an early age. He joins the Korean War and is taken prisoner by the Russians, who brainwash him into becoming a communist. However, he is eventually transferred back to the United States via prisoner exchange, where he is dishonorably discharged and committed to a mental institution. Stuart’s mental state has deteriorated to the point where he now assumes to be a Confederate general during the American Civil War. The second witness is Trent (Hari Rhodes), an African-American man subjected to racial abuse and torture that has driven him insane. As a result, he now pretends to be a white man and a member of the Ku Klux Klan, believing in white supremacy and speaking out against the black community. The third witness is Boden (Gene Evans), an atomic scientist who went mad after learning about the deadly potential of nuclear weapons on civilization, causing his mental capacity to shrink to that of a six-year-old child. Johnny learns the killer’s identity with the help of clues from each witness, but his own mental state starts to decline, bringing him dangerously close to mental collapse. Will his time in the institution finally break him, or will he be able to break the story?
The first challenge in executing the script was to make the viewer believe the plot point of Johnny deceiving the doctors and convincing them that he is mentally ill to get himself admitted to the hospital. Fuller accomplishes that by doing three things. First, in the opening scene, he shows Johnny undergoing training on faking mental illness from an expert psychiatrist, Dr. Fong (Phillip Ahn). Second, a fake incestuous angle is added between Johnny and his sister (impersonated by Cathy) to rationalize Johnny’s mental condition. If that wasn’t enough, Peter Breck’s power-packed performance in the scene before he is admitted to the hospital, acting obsessive and unstable over his sister to the point where he attacks the doctor, who is questioning him, will seal the deal. Fuller’s commitment to storytelling in its purest form is on full display in the painstaking lengths he goes to justify a simple plot point.
Another challenging aspect of the script was depicting Johnny’s mental decline credibly. There have been many films where the protagonist gradually loses their sanity, such as Taxi Driver (1976), The Conversation (1974), American Psycho (1999), The Sword of Doom (1964), etc., but Johnny’s mental shift was the hardest to pull off because he doesn’t show any of the classic signs (such as isolation, guilt, paranoia, etc.) of a character going mad. Fuller handles Johnny’s emotional state delicately and builds his descent gradually. When Johnny arrives at the hospital, he meets some strange people. First, there are the three witnesses whose stories of bigotry, racism, and paranoia shock him. Then there is Pagliacci (Larry Tucker), Johnny’s bed neighbor, a large, overweight guy who always sings opera and seems entirely unpredictable in his conduct. There is a scene in which he wakes Johnny up and forces bits of gum into his mouth, informing him that repeatedly chewing the gum tires the jaw muscles, which in turn tires the other muscles and causes sleepiness. Johnny also accidentally finds himself in a ward full of nymphomaniacs who attack him by pouncing all over him, severely wounding him. As the phrase goes, “You are defined by the company you keep,” and because Johnny is surrounded by lunacy, his mental health suffers. However, when Johnny becomes inadvertently entangled in a hospital riot and receives shock therapy, his mental state worsens drastically. At one point, he starts believing his girlfriend, Cathy, to be his real sister and rejects a kiss from her when she visits him in the hospital. There is a scene in which Johnny eventually learns the identity of the murderer from Boden, who enjoys sketching. But when he sees Boden’s drawing of him, he goes berzerk and attacks him, resulting in additional shock treatments. As a result, he doesn’t appear to recall the killer’s identity, driving him crazy, at which point he yells, “Somebody do something about my head. Help my head. It hurts!” It’s heartbreaking watching him spiral into lunacy, and Peter Breck’s excellent performance, which was physically and emotionally demanding, raises the film to another level.
Towards the end of the film, there is an extended action sequence between Johnny and one of the staff that moves from a hydrotherapy room through the kitchen to the main corridor. The action feels visceral, energetic, and intense as they fight hard and dirty, breaking cupboards, sending utensils flying, and destroying the food in the kitchen. Fuller courageously never cuts the shot and keeps the camera static at a wide angle, and the action choreography is so immaculate that it puts most of the action scenes in the current films to shame.
Samuel Fuller was well-known for his economical writing; he could convey in a single scene what would take other writers two or three. For instance, the first scene of Shock Corridor establishes so many things at once, from Johnny’s character introduction to his ambition to his relationship with Cathy and her love for him to his plan of infiltrating a mental institution, etc. All this is conveyed in just one scene in an efficient and well-organized manner. That was Fuller’s area of expertise, and as a result, his films required less budget and less runtime.
Shock Corridor movie links: IMDB
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