Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Damn right I heard that as a threat.

And now I have baud making fun of me. this day can’t get worse.

You cannot shame the shameless.

Give the craziest people you know everything they want and hope they don’t ask for more? Great plan.

Let’s finish the job.

“Everybody’s entitled to be an idiot.”

We still have time to mess this up!

Today’s GOP: why go just far enough when too far is right there?

The GOP is a fucking disgrace.

Meanwhile over at truth Social, the former president is busy confessing to crimes.

The cruelty is the point; the law be damned.

Just because you believe it, that doesn’t make it true.

It’s time for the GOP to dust off that post-2012 autopsy, completely ignore it, and light the party on fire again.

Historically it was a little unusual for the president to be an incoherent babbling moron.

Take hopelessness and turn it into resilience.

Reality always lies in wait for … Democrats.

They traffic in fear. it is their only currency. if we are fearful, they are winning.

We are aware of all internet traditions.

This has so much WTF written all over it that it is hard to comprehend.

Teach a man to fish, and he’ll sit in a boat all day drinking beer.

Peak wingnut was a lie.

It’s easy to sit in safety and prescribe what other people should be doing.

T R E 4 5 O N

Insiders who complain to politico: please report to the white house office of shut the fuck up.

You are here: Home / Guest Posts / New Feature: Introducing the Weekend Movie Club

New Feature: Introducing the Weekend Movie Club

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weekend movie cat

From renowned commentor Schroedinger’s Cat:

Do you need a respite from the Trump Horror Show that we are watching unfold? Starting this week, we will feature a movie review every weekend. I am happy to announce that the Insufferable Movie Snob, a serious student of movie making has joined forces with me in this endeavor…

Shock Corridor and Masculine Fragility

I want to thank Schroedinger’s Cat for inviting me to post with her on her blog. She thought our two ways of writing about movies and culture would be compatible, so here I am! I still have my (sadly neglected) blog about Pre-Code movies, so I’m going to use this space to talk about other movies in the same vein that don’t fit into the Pre-Code time period of 1929 to 1934. Today’s topic is Samuel Fuller, who managed to independently produce his own films his own way at the height of the studio system by imitating the ploy of the Pre-Codes and not submitting his films to the censorship office until they were completed. This allowed him to explore stories and subjects that were supposed to be off-limits, as in today’s featured film, Shock Corridor (1963).

A word of warning for those who’ve never read my regular blog, The Insufferable Movie Snob: my motto is “All Spoilers, All The Time.” If you don’t want to know what happens in Shock Corridor, go watch it and then come back to read this.

Okay? Okay.

First of all, if you’ve never seen a Samuel Fuller film, you may not want to start with Shock Corridor. Trust me on this. Maybe start with Underworld USA (1961) or The Steel Helmet (1951) instead, because this movie gives you concentrated Fuller at top volume, complete with bizarre hallucinations, barely audible voiceovers, and a “mystery” plot that’s a complete throwaway. The murder that Johnny Barrett (Peter Breck) goes mad trying to solve is the shaggy dog story on which Fuller hangs his musings about the toxicity of American masculinity.

One of the reasons I love Fuller’s films so much is their strange combination of hard-hitting brutality and hallucinatory fantasy. He delivers his philosophy with a punch to the head that leaves you a little disoriented, but certainly gets his message across. Shock Corridor was made fast and cheap – according to Fuller, he filmed for 10 days on a single soundstage – but it lands a punch square in the middle of the fantasy of impregnable American masculinity, showing us a series of men who have been damaged to the point of madness by their attempts to live up to impossible standards, and then discarded in the insane asylum. It shows a toxic, all-male world where women are only allowed as weeping visitors desperate to communicate with the men they love or as insane “nymphos” who rip apart any man unlucky enough to encounter them. Johnny’s fellow patients are desperate to talk, to tell their stories, but Johnny is so focused on his single goal that he has no interest in listening to them and, like all the selfish men in Fuller’s films, he pays a heavy price.

So what is it that Johnny wants? Without using her name, he wants to best Nellie Bly, the intrepid reporter who made her reputation in the late 19th century by getting herself committed to an insane asylum and reporting on the horrific conditions inside. Bly was able to get the asylum investigated and conditions improved through her reporting, but Johnny just wants fame. Specifically, he wants to win a Pulitzer Prize for his story by solving the unsolved murder of one of the asylum’s inmates.

In order to do this, Johnny has been coached by a psychiatrist to fake an incestuous infatuation with his sister, only Johnny doesn’t have a sister. Instead, he has talked his girlfriend, Cathy (Constance Towers), into pretending to be his sister and reporting him to the police so he will be involuntarily committed. She balks at the last minute, pleading with Johnny to not go through with his plan, but he insists and, after he cuts off communication with her, she goes to the police station and haltingly reports that her “brother” has been molesting her.

Enter the first Fulleresque touch – Cathy is a stripper/torch singer, who has one of the weirdest, most melancholy strip tease scenes you’ll ever see as she sings about wanting to find a man who will love her (though this is 1963 Hollywood, so she only strips down to a bikini). Johnny clearly has issues with her career and says some cruel things about it when they argue which, in a Fuller film, is what seals his eventual doom. Fuller’s films are filled with women who are prostitutes, junkies, and strippers, but woe betide the man who disrespects them or belittles them. The Fuller universe will always punish those men in the end…

Reader Interactions

68Comments

  2. 2.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @redshirt:

    I used to read the LOLCat Bible all the time, but I had kind of forgotten about it in recent years. Thanks for the great reminder.

    splitted teh lite from dark but taht wuz ok cuz kittehs can see in teh dark An not tripz over nethin

    LOL indeed.

  4. 4.

    gene108

    Watched part of new show on Fox “Son of Zorn”. It is dumb. It came on after football games.

    Zorn is a nicer version of “Korgoth of Barbaria”, and is able to come to our planet Earth. He has a teenage son, an ex-wife, and a smart phone etc in Orange County, CA, who he decides to visit, instead of hacking his way through a horde of bad guys.

    He does not visit often and wants to be a part of his kids life again.

    Zorn is literally a cartoon, from a sword and sorcery planet/dimension and all the people in the OC are normal not cartoons. Zorn’s sword and sorcery world is animated/cartoons.

    I guess the whole hook of the show is watching live actors interact with a literal cartoon figure barbarian right out of the comics.

    I am not sure how this multiverse exists and why cartoons can move back and forth to regular Earth. They just can.

    I could see this show running on a cable network for summer, but not for a regular season.

  7. 7.

    Schlemazel

    I have to say I have never heard of the films of Samuel Fuller, you do make it sound interesting though. Might have to dig around & find a copy

  10. 10.

    karen marie

    Quickie before I run off to make dinner (tuna melt!). Finally watched “Selma” last night (it’s free with Amazon Prime). I cannot recommend it enough as a reminder of how recently we lived in a racially segregated country and how hard the fight was to gain a meaningful right to vote for disenfranchied people of color. The fight for freedom and liberty is ongoing, even though as a white person it usually doesn’t appear that way. I love David Oyewolo. He did a great job as MLK.

  11. 11.

    Botsplainer

    Watched Elvis & Nixon on the plane. Weird but fun.

    Spacey does a great Nixon. And Michael Shannon is a weirdly perfect Elvis.

  14. 14.

    MomSense

    This is a great addition. I have never watched Samuel Fuller films before. I happen to have a fair amount of knitting to do so this could work out well.

  15. 15.

    Temporarily Max McGee (Soon Enough to Be Andy K Again)

    @Schlemazel:

    Fuller was a great auteur. Along with schrodinger’s cat’s suggestion, I recommend Pickup on South Street (1953) and the semi-autobiographical The Big Red One (1980).

    Fuller wasn’t just a great writer/director, but a fascinating guy altogether. I think there are a couple of docs on him floating around the internet, and plenty of biographical articles.

  22. 22.

    Temporarily Max McGee (Soon Enough to Be Andy K Again)

    @Mnemosyne:

    Yeah, I’ve seen that. Not much of a fan of westerns, but I did enjoy that one.

    The Steel Helmet is probably my favorite of all of his films- but Pickup on South Street is a very, very close second place. That’s some great film noir.

  25. 25.

    catclub

    If you don’t want to know what happens in Shock Corridor, go watch it and then come back to read this.

    Th biggest spoiler of them all.

  27. 27.

    Chris

    @gene108: korgoth was great..I assume they never made more cause it was just too awesome..lol “hey!…there’s a girl tied to a tree!..what’s your sign baby?”

  28. 28.

    Mary G

    Maybe something on Netflix or Amazon Prime? Roger Ebert used to mention excellent obscure things that I could never find amongst all the dreck. Since he left I haven’t found anyone as reliable, except a few here and there on this blog.

  29. 29.

    lamh36

    @Mnemosyne: love Queen Sugar.

    it’s already a thing among my people but I’ve been challenging people other than Black folks to watch it as well.

    it’s shot beautifully the story is very engrossing and I believe the entire series is directed by woman of color and also written by majority women as well.

    Duvernay directs the first two “premiere” episodes and the rest by new and upcoming filmmakers of color

  30. 30.

    Feathers

    Hope you don’t mind if I jump in with some background:

    Had the good fortune to go to several screenings in at the Brattle Theater and Harvard Film Archive with Fuller attending in the 90s, at some long defunct film festival. Quite an amazing man, and he loved hamming it up for the audience. For a taste of his wild self, check out the documentary Samuel Fuller, the typewriter, the rifle and the movie camera, in full on YouTube, with Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino, and Jim Jarmusch.

    His father died when he was young. He went to work in the newspaper business, starting as a copy boy at 12, writer by 17. Eventually he began writing pulp fiction and then screenplays. When WWII came, he enlisted as an infantryman. He was in the First Infantry Division, The Big Red One, and fought in North Africa, Sicily, was in the first wave on D-Day and marched across Europe, including the Battle of the Bulge, eventually liberating the Falkenau concentration camp. I think this is why his films, although violent, work. He is working from memory, and the emotional violence is as horrific as the physical. In introducing one of the films, he talked about how one of the realities of war is the kids. You would arrive at the most bombed to hell village, and a kid would come running up, who had survived somehow. They couldn’t take the kid along, but would leave behind whatever food and water they could. It’s that sort of details that inform his war movies.

    Shock Corridor is probably peak Fuller. He’s moved beyond the westerns, war and crime films, but retains their emotional violence in a deeply stylized manner. My favorite starting place for Fuller is Pickup on South Street. It’s a gritty noir, with Richard Widmark as a pickpocket who steals a wallet containing a microfilm with government secrets about to be delivered to a Communist spy. This sets off both the underworld and the Feds trying to get the wallet back.

    His films are on Criterion, probably because of Martin Scorsese’s fandom. The are on Hulu through at least the end of November. TCM and Criterion are putting together a streaming service, but I don’t know when it is going to be starting. Currently streaming: Shock Corridor, Naked Kiss, I Shot Jesse James, Baron of Arizona, and Steel Helmet.

    I’ve had the Sam Fuller documentary running while typing this up. At around the 40 minute mark,, they start talking about politics:
    INTERVIEWER: Fascists?
    FULLER: Enemy of mankind!
    INTERVIEWER: Communists?
    FULLER: Enemy of mankind!
    INTERVIEWER: Democrats:
    FULLER: (Pause, then little smile) Mankind!

  31. 31.

    lamh36

    @karen marie: I saw Selma early in a screening. I’d been touring it since it first opened and was almost principled defender against detractors.

    it was robbed at the Ocars and I’ll leave it at that

  32. 32.

    Temporarily Max McGee (Soon Enough to Be Andy K Again)

    @Mnemosyne:

    Tough for me to make suggestions like this for others. If I were as motivated as you, I’d do at least a week on long takes/shots and steadicams. Then I’d beat myself up for committing to one scene or the other being the best EVAH!

    (It’s definitely the Copa scene from Goodfellas. No, wait, it’s the opening scene from Boogie Nights . No, that’s an homage to the Copa scene…It’s the opening scene from The Player…It’s the camp-of-Okies scene from Bound For Glory…It’s Rope…I’m going insane!!!!)

  37. 37.

    hovercraft

    @Mnemosyne:
    I recorded the first two, my understanding was that it’s a min-series, so I’m saving them to watch over a weekend once it’s done.

  38. 38.

    schrodinger's cat

    Up next, I could do a Hindi movie, or a movie about the financial crisis or science fiction (Trek because its the 50th anniversary). If I figure out how, I can put up a poll on my blog.
    Other suggestions, ideas welcome.

  39. 39.

    Mnemosyne

    @lamh36:

    Selma got robbed for multiple reasons: because Duvernay is black, because she’s a woman, and because she didn’t go to film school with the boys club that still runs everything in Hollywood.

    I really hope Mira Nair’s Queen of Katwe is good, because Disney is pushing it hard as their Oscar Bait movie. Basically, they’re daring the Academy not to nominate it.

  42. 42.

    Feathers

    Just wanted to add, if you are looking for something to complement Fuller, check out Seijun Suzuki, his Japanese counterpart. Also a WWII vet, he worked for Nikkatsu Studio, Japan’s version of Hammer, AIP or Corman’s studio, specializing in Yakuza stories. Where to start? Branded to Kill is probably best, it’s as if Sam Fuller made a James Bond spoof Elvis movie. It’s on Hulu now, along with Gate of Flesh, Tokyo Drifter, and Youth of the Beast.

  48. 48.

    Feathers

    @Mnemosyne: TCM and Criterion are joining together to start a streaming service called Flimstruck. I ended up cutting the cord when I went back to school. I really do miss TCM, but I was spending to much time sucked into the cable news. So glad it is gone with this election. I do one streaming service at a time. Currently on a one month Hulu preview. Got it to watch RuPaul and catch up on Project Runway, but it turns out you need to have cable to watch the current seasons. Hulu really does suck, other than the Criterion. They keep offering me free months, however, so I occasionally take them up on it.

    Thanks so much for doing this series. I was a total film buff back when you had to go to the theaters for it. Never really caught up with the online community. I must admit I’m not a film snob, I pretty much love them all. Film noir is my home genre, but I go for silents, Hong Kong, westerns, musicals.

  49. 49.

    Mnemosyne

    @Feathers:

    I’m a snob in that I like cult movies and obscure movies, but not art movies. I’m deciding what classic horror I should highlight for Halloween — Universal, Hammer, Val Lewton, or a Pre-Code like The Island of Dr. Moreau or The Most Dangerous Game?

  50. 50.

    hovercraft

    I’m watching the roast of Ann Coulter, I mean Rob Lowe, it’s really mean, but only so so funny. I’m watching for the Coulter hate, she looks somewhat bemused by all the hatred flowing her way. Best line of the night so far is from Jewel. “As a feminist, so I can’t support everything that’s being said up here tonight, as somebody who hates Ann Coulter I’m delighted.”

  51. 51.

    NotMax

    Problem (for me) with Fuller’s films is that they all come across as projects he lost interest in somewhere along the line, perhaps in post-production editing, resulting in a lack of cohesion – the whole ending up being less than the sum of the parts. Stark imagery is fine but is wan substitute for strength and execution of plot.

  52. 52.

    Feathers

    @Mnemosyne: Ah, makes sense. I love Hammer. Growing up, there were chopped up versions on TV as “The Afternoon Matinee.” Funny explaining that to folks these days. The Universal films, sometimes they seem campy, but on other viewings, the same scene will rip my guts out and I’ll cry. It is a matter of slipping into the rhythm of the film. You have to surrender, in a way. There are also the black and white horror films of the early 60s, The Haunting, The Innocents, Bunny Lake is Missing. I’m sure there are more.

  54. 54.

    Tokyokie

    I agree that Shock Corridor is not a good place to start watching Sam Fuller movies, but it’s a lot less deranged that The Naked Kiss or White Dog. I was going to suggest that the restored version of The Big Red One is a good entry into his oeuvre, but I can’t watch it without noticing the flaws induced by the constraints of he meager budget he was afforded and thinking what the movie might have been had he’d had a tenth of the budget Spielberg had for Saving Private Ryan. So I’d suggest trying Pickup on South Street. It’s a great film noir, is filled with recognizable actors like Dick Widmark and Thelma Ritter, and it touches on a lot of the themes with which Fuller would deal throughout his career.

    Several years ago, I met Fuller (and his wife, Christa Lang) at the Sundance Film Festival, and I got Sam to autograph my three-sheet of The Naked Kiss, and he wrote on it, “You like this film. Don’t try a sequel unless your head likes the thud of a phone.” Not only a Fuller autograph, but a Fulleresque quote. It’s my proudest possession.

    As for a follow-up, what about Fuller’s good friend Richard Brooks? Both were Jewish former newspaper hands, and they showed similar sensibilities, even if Brooks enjoyed more mainstream success than Fuller. Brooks’ Deadline U.S.A. just came out on Blu-ray, and it is the greatest newspaper film ever made.

    @Feathers: I’m not sure there is a safe entry point for Suzuki-sama. His films generally show a profound contempt for Japanese cultural tradition, yet are so steeped in those traditions that without some understanding of them, the viewer is completely lost. Not that Branded to Kill makes a whole lot of sense even if one comes to it with such knowledge. Like Fuller, Suzuki worked on the periphery of respectable mainstream cinema, where his lunacy wouldn’t attract as much attention, but damn, Branded to Kill, which essentially got him banished from making movies for 30 years, is an even a bigger “fuck you” to the system than Fuller’s White Dog, which ended Fuller’s Hollywood career.

  55. 55.

    Mnemosyne

    @Tokyokie:

    I think The Naked Kiss is less deranged, actually, especially once you plow through the euphemisms to realize that Kelly is an ex-prostitute and her fiancé is a child molester (hey, I did warn that I was all spoilers, all the time).

    Not only that, but that Fuller sees nothing morally wrong with prostitution and so has no trouble showing Kelly as the unabashed heroine of the movie. She gets to walk out of town free and clear and with her head held high, unlike Johnny Barrett.

    I still think that Underworld USA is probably the best distilled version of Fuller’s view of women. Once you realize that Tolly ends up dying because he mocked his ex-junkie girlfriend for thinking he would ever settle down with someone like her, you understand Fuller’s worldview.

    Fuller was basically making Pre-Code-like films in the 1950s and 1960s, because he made them without the scripts being run through the Breen office beforehand like all of the studios had to do. That’s one of the reasons the plots end up feeling a little choppy, NotMax — the censor’s scissors tried to trim Fuller back and sometimes left some odd plot holes in their wake.

  58. 58.

    M. Bouffant

    Ah, Shock Corridor. Constance Towers in black bra & half-slip. Also introduced me to the term “head-candler” for a psychiatrist.

    That said, Fuller is terribly underappreciated. Good job bringing him back to our attention.

  59. 59.

    Tokyokie

    @Mnemosyne: I agree with you about Fuller’s view toward women in The Naked Kiss. The in-your-face shock of the opening scene firmly establishes her as the heroine of the piece. But I’d argue that the deranged part is the weird mixture of sentimentality, small-town Americana and cynicism. It’s like a Jim Thompson novel with cover art by Norman Rockwell. And I’d argue that whereas Underworld U.S.A. is a good distillation of Fuller’s themes, the unrelenting cynicism of its main character is off-putting even 50 years later. Pickup on South Street I find is more approachable than Fuller’s other films, and therefore a good place to start for somebody new to his work.

  60. 60.

    a thousand flouncing lurkers (was fidelio)

    @Temporarily Max McGee (Soon Enough to Be Andy K Again): I think The Big Red One may be one of the ten best movies about warfare ever made. Roger Ebert called it one of the most expensive B-movies ever made, because “”A” war movies are about War, but “B” war movies are about soldiers” (quoted at the Wikipedia article about the movie).
    It’s violent, brutal, confusing, and touching without turning into violence porn or becoming maudlin. I can’t watch it often, but when I do it captures my complete attention.

  65. 65.

    Temporarily Max McGee (Soon Enough to Be Andy K Again)

    @Mnemosyne:

    After sleeping on it, I’ve got a suggestion: John Milius’ Big Wednesday. Have no idea if TCM has it in their catlog. And while I know Milius politics are to the right of Genghis Khan (and those still shows up in this film), but the film is pretty damned good for a nostalgic look at some Boomers’ younger selves, a la American Graffiti, but it deserves a look for its visual beauty if nothing else.

  66. 66.

    jake the antisoshul soshulist

    Huge fan of Fuller. There are not many filmakers who make prostitutes/strippers the moral center of their films as often as Fuller did.
    Examples being The Naked Kiss, Pickup On South Street, China Gate.

  67. 67.

    WaterGirl

    @lamh36: I love Queen Sugar. What I couldn’t believe is that a one-hour TV show could feel like a 2-hour movie.

    I saw an interview with Ava Duvernay. I was so impressed. If I understood her correctly, she said that EVERYONE in/on/behind the scenes of Queen Sugar is female. She basically said that hollywood is a boys club and mostly the women don’t get to play, and that all these women are getting a chance to film, direct, etc. I find myself hopeful that Oprah having her own network might help turn that around.

    Oh, and to the person who thought they might wait and binge watch Queen Sugar, I’m not at all sure that this is the film for binge watching. You can binge watch shows like Supergirl and I find it really helpful to binge watch shows with a lot of detail or where they jump around in time, like Person of Interest or LOST or The Expanse. This would be like binge watching 4 really serious movies in a row. Maybe watch one episode and see whether you want to wait and binge watch the rest?

  68. 68.

    Hamilton

    It was nice to see someone else upthread draw the parallel between Fuller and Jim Thompson. Those two are without equal when talking about the underlying paranoia and cruelty particular to mid-20th C. USA. The issues some of you raised regarding Fuller are duly noted, but dismissed. Having seen The Naked Kiss as an impressionable young man, I believe I am justified in my casual dismissal. ;]

    Also, too: Fuller makes a brief (genuinely funny) cameo appearance in Godard’s Pierrot le Fou.

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