Continuing our Prisons of the Body, Prisons of the Soul series, Christina Newland looks at the idea of containment in Sam Fuller’s Shock Corridor (1963).
“When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies?”
- Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote
Samuel Fuller’s 1963 cult feature Shock Corridor opens with a foreboding quote: “Whom God wishes to destroy… He first makes mad.” It’s an easily forgotten introduction in a film stuffed with theatrical pulp of the highest order. Certainly, it’s ‘ripped -from- the- headlines’ sensibility make the previous decade’s noirs look tame in comparison. The titular corridor, it turns out, is located in a psychiatric institution where a homicide has occurred. Ambitious journalist Johnnie (Peter Breck), desperate to win a Pulitzer Prize, decides to go ‘undercover’ at the asylum to learn the killer’s identity. Against the better judgement of his stripper girlfriend Cathy (an always memorable Constance Towers), Johnnie convinces her to pose as his put-upon sister, who must then claim he is pursuing her with aggressive sexual advances. Labelled a deviant, Johnnie is placed in the psychiatric ward.
Once inside the institution, a frightening place in heavily stylised chiaroscuro where blank-eyed patients wander the corridor, Johnnie encounters a trio of patients, each representing an ailment in wider American society. One, a veteran of the Korean War, was brainwashed by Communists and branded a traitor; he now believes himself to be a heroic Confederate war hero. Another was once an eminent nuclear physicist, so disturbed by his contribution to the bomb that he has reverted to the mental state of a small child. The third, most unsettlingly, is one of the first black students integrated into a white Southern university. Unable to shoulder this burden, he has become a virulent KKK supporter, driving the other patients into a white supremacist frenzy.
