Shock Corridor
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Whom the gods would destroy--epigraph "Do you think i'm a fetishist?" "Hell no, Johnny!"--Johnny Barrett to Doctor Fong |
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Shock Corridor is a 1963 film which tells the story of a journalist who gets himself committed to a mental hospital in order to track the story of an unsolved murder. It stars Peter Breck, Constance Towers, Gene Evans, James Best, Hari Rhodes and Larry Tucker.
The movie was written and directed by Samuel Fuller and has been deemed "culturally significant" by the United States Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the National Film Registry.
Plot
Bent on winning a Pulitzer Prize, ambitious journalist Johnny Barrett hopes to uncover the facts behind the unsolved murder of Sloan, an inmate at a psychiatric hospital. He convinces an expert psychiatrist, Dr. Fong, to coach him to appear insane when it involves relating imaginary accounts of incest with his "sister", who is impersonated by his exotic-dancer girlfriend, Cathy; though against her wishes, she is talked into assisting him by filing a police complaint, and his performance during the investigation convinces the authorities to incarcerate him in the institution where the murder took place. Johnny is quickly disturbed by the behavior of his fellow inmates, and on one occasion is mauled by a group of female nymphomaniacs who assault him in their ward.
Johnny learns there were three witnesses to the murder, each driven insane by the stresses of war, bigotry, or fear of nuclear annihilation: The first, Stuart, is the son of a Southern sharecropper who was taught bigotry and hatred as a child. He was captured in the Korean War and was brainwashed into becoming a Communist. Stuart was ordered to indoctrinate a fellow prisoner, but instead the prisoner's unwavering patriotism reformed him. Stuart's captors pronounced him insane and he was returned to the United States in a prisoner exchange, after which he received a dishonorable discharge and was publicly reviled as a traitor. Stuart now imagines himself to be Confederate States of America General J.E.B. Stuart. Through conversation with Stuart, Johnny discerns that the killer was likely a hospital staff member, as Stuart recalled the assailant was dressed in white.
The second witness to Sloan's murder, Trent, was one of the first black students to integrate a segregated Southern university. Psychologically traumatized by the abuses he suffered there, he now imagines himself a member of the Ku Klux Klan, and stirs up the patients with white nationalist dogma. The third and final witness is Boden, an atomic scientist scarred by the knowledge of the devastating power of intercontinental ballistic missiles. He has regressed to the mentality of a six-year-old child.
After a hospital riot, Barrett is straitjacketed and subjected to shock treatment, and comes to believe Cathy is truly his sister, rejecting her when she comes to visit. He experiences many other symptoms of mental breakdown while he learns the identity of the killer: Wilkes, a hospital attendant who committed the murder to cover up his sexual liaisons with numerous female patients. Johnny confronts Wilkes in the hydrotherapy room, and begins a violent altercation with him, eventually extracting a confession in front of witnesses.
Wilkes is apprehended, and Johnny is finally able to write his story on Sloan's murder, but the ordeal leaves him with a shattered psyche, and he is diagnosed with schizophrenia. Some time later, Cathy visits Johnny in the hospital. She laments to a psychologist about Johnny's mental decline, as Johnny sits idly in a catatonic state.
References in film
- In The Dreamers (2003), the main character is watching Shock Corridor at the beginning.
Cast
- Peter Breck as Johnny Barrett
- Constance Towers as Cathy
- Gene Evans as Boden
- James Best as Stuart
- Hari Rhodes as Trent
- Larry Tucker as Pagliacci
- Paul Dubov as Dr. Menkin
- Chuck Roberson as Wilkes
- Bill Zuckert as Swanson
- Philip Ahn as Dr. Fong
