The O-town Scene - Oneonta, NY
Issue link: https://www.ifoldsflip.com/i/28770
Vintage Video ‘Shock Corridor,’ 1963 Featuring Peter Breck, Constance Towers and James Best “This long corridor is the magic highway to the Pulitzer Prize,” muses the shockingly brittle mind of Johnny Barret (Peter Breck) via voice-over. He’s an ambitious reporter who’s managed to smuggle himself into an asylum, all to learn (and write about) who killed a fellow mental patient. Barret hopes to escape — his story and thinking cap — intact. There’s no shortage of strange magic at work in Samuel Fuller’s “Shock Corridor” (1963) — to the degree that the stark psycho-drama takes on an almost supernatural, science- fiction feel. It all makes for a suspenseful, memorable story, even if it doesn’t always make complete cognitive-behavioral sense. To be embedded with mental extremists (and all potential suspects), Johnny needs Cathy (Constance Towers), his main squeeze, to help him earn his institutional stripes. She very reluctantly does him the double favor of not only pretending to be his sister, but accusing him of attempted incest. This fits him for his strait-jacket nicely. “You’ve got to be crazy to want to be com- mitted to an insane asylum to solve a mur- der!” Cathy cries, as if pitching Corridor’s very premise to a room-full of obsessive- compulsive producers. Johnny, meanwhile, remains convinced that he’s crazy like a schizophrenia-faking fox. Cathy’s thoroughly crack-pot theory is that Barret’s sure to crack up if he exposes himself to such a concentrated talent pool of mental illness (cue hydro-therapy). The notion of craziness as a contagion is a neurosis that afflicts the film itself — Cathy’s fears almost instantly begin to bear prescription-strength fruit as soon as Johnny joins the medicated party. “You’ll be facing the best psychiatrists in the state!” Dr. Fong (Philip Ahn) insists as Johnny’s insanity coach. That policy of excel- lence does not necessarily extend to Corridor security — wild brawls and wacked-out dem- onstrations abound. In the cafeteria, a tall steel cauldron smokes mightily, as if manu- factured by the witches from “MacBeth.” “Sister” Cathy tries to keep it together on the outside; she’s a burlesque performer (what Johnny terms “singing in your skin”), and her routine jarringly juxtaposes senti- mental vocals with herky-jerky gyrations, clearly choreographed by a herky-jerky nutjob. Stripping and psychiatry have come a long way in half a century, I suppose. Fuller essentially breaks his Corridor into three acts — there’s a trio of witnesses, supervised Wise Men who’ve mostly lost their wits. Each of them carries some of the answer (in Barret’s eyes, they’re hoarding parts of his Pulitzer) in their fragmented minds. Stuart (James Best) is an ex-Communist who’s convinced himself he’s a Confederate Major General. Trent (Hari Rhodes) is an African- American former student who forges hoods from pilfered pillow cases and stages sudden asylum Klan rallies — the summoned throng of raving mental patients makes for a fine parody of racism and mobs, not to mention racist mobs. Boden (Gene Evans), Bonkers Bachelor No. 3, is a first-class fission scientist who’s regressed back to early childhood. Hate-filled parents, Cold War pressures, the cruelty of bigotry, the relentless specter of nuclear disaster — they’re all madnesses that might understandably result in all sorts of trauma. And yet one wonders whether these insanely sympathetic patients would all go crazy in quite the theatrically convenient way that they do here — invariably given to elaborate, illuminating monologuing about their condition, for instance. At times, Fuller’s subjects seem to have fallen prey to a permanent Opposite Day. When we see a resident toting a racist sign down the institutional “street” (what patients “You’ve got to be crazy to want to be committed to an insane asylum to solve a murder!” Cathy cries, as if pitching Corridor’s very premise to a room-full of obsessive-compulsive producers. Johnny, meanwhile, remains convinced that he’s crazy like a schizophrenia-faking fox. the witnesses, it’s their rare “sane moments” that he must stay tuned for, and it can be a maddening wait indeed. and staff calls the booby-hatch hallway), we get a jolt. As the placard lowers, we see the second, shock value-infused surprise: it’s Trent himself who’s intently holding it. Looniness lurks around just about every corner of “Corridor.” When Cathy wants to put the kibosh on the operation, Barrett’s boss Swanson (William Zuckert) threatens her, claiming that failing to finish his mission might set off an amorphous “depressive psy- chosis.” According to such manipulative Alice in Wonderland logic, you’re mad if you do, and mad if you don’t. And of course, Cathy’s concern for her fake brother’s welfare doesn’t preclude her from finally signing off on shock treatments — her absurd early ’60s scheme being that either the threat (or the electrify- ing effects) of such enhanced “therapy” will somehow jolt him back to his senses. It’s the sort of rock-solid cartoon reasoning that cures amnesia with an anvil to the noggin. Nevertheless, “Shock”’s play-like structure provides a welcome showcase for a collection of very fine actors, and Fuller’s (sometimes overly poetic) script certainly offers them freedom from any kind of thespianic strait- jacket. When Barret cues a pianist to play a Southern ditty during “Dance Therapy” to get a rise out of Stuart, the counterfeit Confeder- ate, James Best does not merely “whistle” the requested “Dixie”— he twitches and spasms it, his hair-triggered senses overwhelmed. In Barret’s desperate, exclusive interviews with As frothing at the mouth as we are for Fuller to inform us who- dunit, we find ourselves hoping that these three wholly humanized ghosts of Cuckoo Nest’s past, pres- ent, and yet to come (interestingly enough, Ken Kesey’s “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” novel was published just the year before) find some measure of mental peace as well. Sadly, a disturbingly antiquated approach to “mental hygiene,” coupled with Fuller’s fairly bleak outlook, make any exit from the “Corridor” look like a horribly uphill climb. Stuart and Trent both break through the black-and-white noir that marks most of “Shock,” as each experiences a technicolor “vision” that precedes their pass- ing, elusive spells of clarity (and subsequent testimony). When Barret gets hit with his own personal case of the kooky color spectrums, Fuller’s conditioned us (in true Ivan Pavlov style) to know that Johnny’s crossed over into his own Oz. For those of us who are much closer to being mental patients than medical doctors, it’s impossible to tell how psychologically accurate any of Fuller’s undeniably effective stuff actually is. Fuller bookends Barret’s story with the same grim sentiments from Euripedes: “He whom god wishes to destroy, he first makes mad.” The psychology on display in “Shock Corridor” may not be exactly as ancient as 425 B.C.E., but it’s not exactly nipping at the heels of the most recent DSM-sequel either. But, Fuller knows his drama about as well as the Greeks did. “Shock Corridor” remains a brave, relevant movie, making more striking, enduring statements about the society of its time than it does about the workings of the individual mind. — Sam Benedict Grade: B April 7, 2011 O-Town Scene 15