Shock Corridor

At the end of the 1940s Sam Fuller wrote a script for Fritz Lang entitled Straitjacket. Although never realized, Fuller himself pulled it out of the drawer at the beginning of the ’60s, updated it, and shot a title that enjoys cult status today. Fuller added thirtysomething Johnny Barrett to his charismatic gallery of characters who are hard to identify with. With his girlfriend’s help, the ambitious and mercurial newspaperman pretends to be a sexual pervert in order to enter a psychiatric clinic; one of the patients was recently murdered and Johnny pictures himself accepting a Pulitzer Prize for convicting the perpetrator. But under the influence of the madhouse environment, the border between Johnny’s sham mental aberration and his actual psychological state gradually begins to blur. Fuller sends Johnny to an isolated territory as a way of metaphorically expressing the state of American society at the beginning of the 1960s. Psychological instability, racism, patriotism, the nuclear threat, and sexual perversion are topics which Fuller treats in a rather unusual way. He invited outstanding cameraman Stanley Cortez (The Magnificent Ambersons, The Night of the Hunter) to collaborate on the film, and he contributed to its heightened expressivity through the consistent use of a single light source in each scene.