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… …
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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…