Shock Corridor opens with a still image of a sterile hospital corridor receding into the distance in one point perspective over which the credits roll, beginning with the legend:
“Whom God Wishes to Destroy He First Makes Mad -Euphrides, 425 B.C.”
In Shock Corridor a newspaper reporter Johnny Barrett -played by a devastated Peter Breck- wants to write a story that will get him the Pulitzer prize. He aims to do this by writing a piece uncovering the truth behind a murder that happened at a lunatic asylum by getting himself admitted as a patient. With the help of a psychologist ‘Dr. Fong’, Johnny’s plan is to get inside by proving his insanity through an incestuous relationship he has been having with his ‘sister’. At doctor Fong’s office we see them going over the plan together with Johnny’s boss from the Globe Reporter and his wife Cathy. She is really not happy about the scheme and her involvement in it.
Cathy (Constance Towers who plays a prostitute in Fuller’s next film ‘The Naked kiss) earns money as a stripper by night, something that causes Johnny a great deal of anxiety. Pretending to be his sister, she reports his faux perverted sex crime to the police. He is subsequently apprehended and taken to the asylum for an interview. Here Johnny recites his and Dr. Fong’s well rehearsed script and gets all the predictable responses from his interviewer Dr. Cristo who -convinced that he is indeed insane- proceeds to have him registered.
In the asylum Johnny finds that the real battle isn’t keeping up his cover as a mental patient, it’s hanging onto his sanity. Through draining interactions with his fellow inmates, weaving himself into their crazed fairy tales, he begins to unravel the mystery leading towards the real killer. They have various colourful delusions. Stuart is a Korean war defective who believes himself to be a Confederate general from the Civil Wars. Trent is a young African American university student from a failed integration program who embodies a KKK Grand Wizard and Boden, once a nuclear scientist, has regressed into the mind of a six year old playing hide and seek and doing childish crayon doodles. There are some excruciating character portrayals here, captured in atmospheric grainy black and white by Stanley Cortez, who also shot Charles Laughton’s ‘The Night Of the Hunter’. What follows is both hilarious and disturbing. Apparently contained within the confines of a budget rented sound-stage and a ten day shooting schedule, its something of a miracle how well Shock Corridor turned out, only made possible by Samuel Fuller’s lucid vision and meticulous planning. He had allegedly been working on the concept which started as ‘The Long Corridor’ since the late 1940s. Seen by Fuller a metaphor for 1960s cold war America, it examines all manner of queasy themes including insanity, racism, patriotism, nuclear warfare and sexual perversion. We see all of these raucously embodied in the characters of the inmates.
Our reporter stumbles from one agonizing misadventure to the next as he grapples for his sanity and story. He accidentally stumbles into a strange female ward and is gang raped by nymphomaniacs. He endures repeated Electro-Shock therapy. On top of his already complicated sexual relationship with Cathy, he starts to believe that she really is his sister. He shrinks in disgust when she tries to kiss him during a visiting hours. Johnny has a series of incredible hallucinations including one where he is showered in torrents of rain inside the corridor. He begins to randomly lose the ability to speak at critical moments. Many painful episodes later through forced and broken communications he finds the killer. He strangles his confession out of him in front of witnesses, having pinned him to the ground in the corridor after an epic fight. Thus he finishes his story and succeeds in getting his Pulitzer prize. But at what cost? In the films final scene we see him at a meeting with Cathy and Dr. Cristo.
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