Shock Corridor (1963)
Directed by Samuel Fuller
With the help of his girlfriend Cathy and Dr. Fong, a psychiatrist, ambitious journalist Johnny Barrett poses as a madman in order to be admitted to a mental institution where a bloody murder has been committed.
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What critics compared Shock Corridor to
Watching it, movie references pile up inside your brain: Samuel Fuller's Shock Corridor is in there, certainly, and the cheapo tone poems of the B-movie master Val Lewton.
Grad-level geeks will also recognize the references to Sam Fuller's Shock Corridor, Vincente Minnelli's The Cobweb, and Val Lewton's Isle of the Dead.
It's also an homage to Shock Corridor, a film made by one of his idols, Sam Fuller.
With the creepy and atmospheric “Shutter Island,” the 67-year-old Scorsese cuts a few new notches into his belt: not only is it an adaptation of a bestseller (by Dennis Lehane, who also wrote “Mystic River” and “Gone Baby Gone”), a first for the director, but it’s a mystery-laced-with-psychiatry film, in the vein of “Spellbound,” “The Snake Pit,” “Shock Corridor,” “The Green Mile” or even “The Silence of the Lambs.”
For this distinction, Scorsese hardly needed to have directed Shutter Island, his first movie to fully institutionalize this conditionâ??or, if you prefer, his first to wrestle with the psychoanalytic and insane asylum subgenres, within which Samuel Fullerâ??s Shock Corridor is but the most obvious entry.
In Samuel Fuller 's "Shock Corridor" (1963), an obvious influence on "Shutter Island," the reporter's lover tells him he's crazy to enter the asylum in the name of a good story.
Sam Fuller's Shock Corridor, a film that not only inspired the Nouvelle Vague, but also brilliantly challenged U.S. political institutions and moral presumptions.
In the first sequence, before the film has a chance to find its own point of view and its own images, The Dreamers is already basking in the reflected light and shadow of greatness, as Matthew watches Shock Corridor at the Cinémathèque.
If Sam Fuller 's Cinémathèque fave Shock Corridor imagined the inmates taking over the asylum, the early "events of May," 1968, found the audience in the theater becoming actors in the streets.
"The Dreamers" kicks off with the first protests over the Langlois firing, seen through the eyes of Matthew (Michael Pitt), an American who has come to Paris to "study", though he seems to have spent all of his time in the front row of the Cinematheque ("We wanted to get the images first") soaking up things like "Rebel Without a Cause" and "Shock Corridor".
In the scene close to the opening of The Dreamers when the threesome watch Fuller's Shock Corridor at the Cinémathèque, Bertolucci's way of filming the relationship between spectator and image sets it apart from the cinema scenes in the other films mentioned.
He begins with a clip from Fuller's masterpiece Shock Corridor (1963), but The Dreamers doesn't move with any Fuller-like intensity, any of that crackling, pulp immediacy It hasn't learned anything from Fuller.
The author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Ken Kesey, was said to have been inspired by Samuel Fuller’s work, and this film seems to back that up.
We are at least spared the insipid attempts of pictures like One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest to preciously romanticize the mentally addled; Fuller's asylum does not become the staging area for any transcendent spirit of rebellion, or any faux-realizations that in a crazy world, it's the crazies who are sane.
Johnny convinces the psychiatrist that he has deep underlying sexual conflicts about his "sister," especially after his "acute schizophrenic" episode that occurs when discussing Cathy (imagine Jack Nicolson's "crazy" act in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest as far more controlled).
(Recall if you will the black man in the asylum of Fuller's Shock Corridor who believes himself to be the Grand Wizard of the KKK.)
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Those three seemed at once kidding and serious, in the manner of such Samuel Fuller melodramas as "The Naked Kiss" and "Shock Corridor" (see them if you haven't; they're amazing).
At this point, “I Care a Lot” seems poised to become another nightmare of wrongful institutionalization — a “Shock Corridor” for rest homes.
If it’s “Shock Corridor” meets “Prozac Nation,” how can “Side Effects” have such a terrible title?
The late writer-director Sam Fuller (Pickup on South Street, Shock Corridor), who gets a heartfelt "Thanks for everything" credit at the end of Jackie Brown, used to crank out one movie like this per year, sometimes more.
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Better movies like One Flew Over the Cuckoo�s Nest and Shock Corridor have used the insane asylum as a microcosmic metaphor of our national lunacy, but those films worked to a degree because they didn�t feel like they were exploiting the madness of their characters to make a screenwriter�s statement hold water.
Such a claim is supported with a clever cameo by celebrated American filmmaker Samuel Fuller, director of much beloved classic films such as Shock Corridor (1963) and The Big Red One (1980).