Shock Corridor
| Shock Corridor | |
|---|---|
Film poster
|
|
| Directed by | Samuel Fuller |
| Produced by | Samuel Fuller |
| Written by | Samuel Fuller |
| Starring |
Peter Breck Constance Towers Gene Evans James Best |
| Music by | Paul Dunlap |
| Cinematography | Stanley Cortez |
| Edited by | Jerome Thoms |
| Distributed by | Allied Artists Pictures Corporation (USA) |
|
Release date
|
|
|
Running time
|
101 minutes |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
Shock Corridor is a 1963 film, directed and written by Samuel Fuller. The film tells the story of a journalist who gets himself committed to a mental hospital in order to track an unsolved murder. Fuller originally wrote the film under the title Straitjacket for Fritz Lang in the late 1940s, but Lang wanted to change the lead character to a woman so Joan Bennett could play the role.
Journalist Johnny Barrett (Peter Breck) thinks that the quickest way to a Pulitzer Prize is to uncover the facts behind a murder at a mental hospital. He convinces an expert psychiatrist to coach him to appear insane; this involves relating imaginary accounts of incest with his "sister", who is impersonated by his exotic-dancer girlfriend (Constance Towers). Barrett convinces the authorities and is locked up in the institution where the murder took place. While pursuing his investigation, he is disturbed by the behavior of his fellow inmates.
The three witnesses to the murder were driven insane by the stresses of war, bigotry or fear of nuclear annihilation.
After a hospital riot, Barrett is straitjacketed and subjected to shock treatment. Barrett begins imagining that his girlfriend really is his sister, and experiences many other symptoms of mental breakdown. He learns the identity of the killer and violently extracts a confession from him in front of witnesses and writes his story. His mind is critically damaged, however, and he has to stay in the hospital for an undefined period of time.
In 1996, Shock Corridor was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".
Concurrent with the release of the film in 1963, Belmont Books released a novelization of the screenplay, written by one of the era's most ubiquitous and distinctive paperback pulpsmiths, Michael Avallone. This tie-in title itself earned a share of cult fandom, and was re-released in paperback, in 1990, by UK publisher Xanadu, as part of their Blue Murder mystery imprint.
...
Wikipedia