Coming Soon
SHOCK CORRIDOR
1963
Director
Samuel Fuller
Starring
Peter Breck
Constance Towers
Gene Evans
James Best
Runtime
101 minutes
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In this molotov cocktail of a movie, hard-boiled filmmaker Sam Fuller incinerates Hollywood earnestness while delivering a devastating diagnosis of the multiple psychoses—racism, sexual repression, political paranoia—at the heart of American society.
Hotshot journalist Johnny Barrett (Peter Breck) shams his way into a nuthouse because he wants to solve a murder and climb to the pinnacle of his profession. Working undercover as a patient, he pieces together the clues by getting to know his fellow inmates. But every gain in his knowledge about the killing is another reel downward in his psychic devolution.
SHOCK CORRIDOR hammers home its headline that these inmates, Johnny included, are all pure products of America, driven crazy by their own and their country’s intractable contradictions—a literally schizophrenic historical legacy: imperialism, racism, and the bomb. Fuller goes to such innovative formal lengths to represent their maladies that the film itself feels dangerously unhinged.
“Sam Fuller's comic-strip Amerika. Harsh, grotesque, and violent—and, incidentally, brilliant in a very original way.” - Dave Kehr
Hotshot journalist Johnny Barrett (Peter Breck) shams his way into a nuthouse because he wants to solve a murder and climb to the pinnacle of his profession. Working undercover as a patient, he pieces together the clues by getting to know his fellow inmates. But every gain in his knowledge about the killing is another reel downward in his psychic devolution.
SHOCK CORRIDOR hammers home its headline that these inmates, Johnny included, are all pure products of America, driven crazy by their own and their country’s intractable contradictions—a literally schizophrenic historical legacy: imperialism, racism, and the bomb. Fuller goes to such innovative formal lengths to represent their maladies that the film itself feels dangerously unhinged.
“Sam Fuller's comic-strip Amerika. Harsh, grotesque, and violent—and, incidentally, brilliant in a very original way.” - Dave Kehr