Shock Corridor
With Peter Breck, Constance Towers, Gene Evans.
US, 1963, 35mm, 101 min.
Print source: UCLA
Granted total freedom as screenwriter and director—in a crooked handshake deal that ultimately robbed him of any profits—Fuller created Shock Corridor, an electrifying and disturbing tabloid thriller that reinvents a mental hospital as a dark metaphor for Sixties America. Recklessly pursuing an unsolved murder and the Pulitzer Prize, an overzealous crime reporter uses his stripper girlfriend to convince a mental ward to admit him as a raving sex maniac so he can have access to the patient inside who may know the murderer's identity. Shades of late Fritz Lang haunt the dark cautionary tale, together with ghosts of Fuller's past lives and films—from The Steel Helmet’s Gene Evans as a scientist driven mad by his guilt at having invented the atomic bomb to an African American college student turned imaginary and rabid KKK member, recalling Fuller's brave coverage of the Klan as a young crime reporter. Visited on set by his hero John Ford, Fuller was thrilled to learn that his favorite Ford film, The Informer (1935), had made similarly transformative use of the same confined former RKO backlot.
Part of film series
Screenings from this program
Pickup on South Street
The Crimson Kimono
The Naked Kiss
Underworld U.S.A.
The Baron of Arizona
Merrill's Marauders
House of Bamboo
Fixed Bayonets!
Forty Guns
Dead Pigeon on Beethoven Street
A Fuller Life
Run of the Arrow
Street of No Return
The Steel Helmet
The Big Red One
Shock Corridor
Tigrero: A Film That Was Never Made
