How Shock Corridor reflected the madness of 1960s… | Little White Lies

In Praise Of

How Shock Cor­ri­dor reflect­ed the mad­ness of 1960s America

02 Sep 2019

Words by Rich Johnson

Three men, one holding a sign that reads "Integration and democracy don't go home", sit together in a black and white photograph.
Three men, one holding a sign that reads "Integration and democracy don't go home", sit together in a black and white photograph.
Samuel Fuller’s mur­der mys­tery cap­tures the fear and para­noia which beset post­war society.

With absolute con­vic­tion, a black man pulls a piece of cloth from under his shirt, A sign of the invis­i­ble Empire…” he points to a potent sym­bol that sig­nals the bap­tism of the Ku Klux Klan. KKK. It’ll catch on quick.” In this place he is the Grand High Wiz­ard, If Christ walked the streets of my home­town he’d be hor­ri­fied. You’ve nev­er seen so many black peo­ple clut­ter­ing up our schools and busses and cafes and wash­rooms! I’m for pure Amer­i­can­ism! White supremacy!”

Tim Rob­bins once asked direc­tor Samuel Fuller about this infa­mous scene and he revealed that he hadn’t writ­ten a sin­gle word. Lift­ed from con­gres­sion­al records, this piece of dia­logue is, in fact, a direct quote from an Amer­i­can Con­gress­man, sub­vert­ed by Fuller through the only black char­ac­ter fea­tured in his 1963 film, Shock Corridor.

As a crime reporter and polit­i­cal car­toon­ist dur­ing the 1930s, Fuller tack­led this scene with a tabloid men­tal­i­ty; his approach less about ratio­nal­i­ty than the con­stant quest for truth which stemmed from his keen aware­ness of social issues. Shock Cor­ri­dor is as much a reflec­tion on the mind­set of the indi­vid­ual as it is that of Amer­i­can soci­ety. In his search for truth, whether a crime or the bru­tal real­i­ty of war, the real bat­tle for Fuller was, Between the insane and your own sane mind.”

Set against a back­drop of sim­mer­ing racial ten­sion and released a year before the Civ­il Rights Act was passed into law, Fuller’s film tells the sto­ry of jour­nal­ist John­ny Bar­ret (Peter Breck) who has him­self com­mit­ted to a men­tal insti­tu­tion in order to solve a mur­der. Bar­ret intends to infil­trate three wit­ness­es, each one reflect­ing a dis­turb­ing part of America’s soci­etal back­ground and his­to­ry, using the expe­ri­ence to win the Pulitzer Prize.

The patients are Stu­art (James Best), who imag­ines him­self as a Con­fed­er­ate after being brain­washed, the afore­men­tioned black man mas­querad­ing as a white suprema­cist, Trent (Har­rry Rhodes), and Boden (Gene Evans), an atom­ic sci­en­tist scarred by the dev­as­ta­tion of nuclear pow­er who has now regressed to a child­like state.

Fuller’s micro­cos­mic approach nat­u­ral­ly leant itself to such a con­fined set­ting. The cor­ri­dors them­selves sym­bol­ise America’s fenced-in mind­set, with post­war para­noia at its most potent. Here, a per­son may snap at any moment, reflect­ing pre­vail­ing social ten­sions of the time as well as con­ser­v­a­tive anx­i­eties over the grow­ing women’s lib­er­a­tion move­ment and sex­u­al rev­o­lu­tion. As John­ny enters a room of nympho­ma­ni­acs, their car­nal, zom­bie-like behav­iour calls to mind George A Romero as much as Mas­ters and John­son, as Johnny’s screams, for once, ham­per his inter­nal monologue.

Nor­mal? John­ny once gagged on the word. Con­fi­dent that he would retain his san­i­ty, iron­i­cal­ly it is his love and con­vic­tion that leads to his inevitable break­down. Seem­ing­ly pre-empt­ing the assas­si­na­tion of Pres­i­dent Kennedy, Shock Cor­ri­dor isn’t a film about a mur­der so much as the slow death of Amer­i­ca. Fuller under­stood that for those ren­dered insane or mute, it was impos­si­ble to speak out. In his Amer­i­ca there are no heroes or cow­ards, only a sad, inevitable truth which very few peo­ple were pre­pared to accept.

Shock Cor­ri­dor is released on 2 Sep­tem­ber via The Cri­te­ri­on Collection.

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