In Samuel Fuller's Shock Corridor (1963), Johnny Barrett (Peter Breck), an ambitious and ruthless journalist, tries to get himself admitted into a mental institution in order to be able to investigate the murder of an inmate, which to him seems the only sure-fire way to win a Pulitzer. Fuller, who along with Otto Preminger and Nicholas Ray remains one of the underrated American film masters, doesn't care much for exposition; the opening sequence throws the viewer right into the lurid narrative: Johnny is rehearsing his routine with a psychiatrist, Dr. Fong (Philip Ahn), as his editor, Swanee (Bill Zuckert), and girlfriend, Cathy (Constance Towers), quietly observe. Cathy, a striptease artist who dreams of a "normal" life, is having second thoughts about the role she'll have to play in Johnny's plan, which consists in going to the police pretending to be his sister and filing a complaint detailing Johnny's incestuous feelings and sexually aggressive behavior towards her. At first, Johnny's plan works just as he and Dr. Fong had predicted. He gets admitted to the mental institution and even makes some progress in his investigation. In the process of trying to get information from the three witnesses to the murder--one a young soldier who fancies himself a Confederate general, another a student who has been so shaken by the experience of being the only black at his university in South Carolina that he has assumed the identity of a Ku Klux Klan member, the last a nuclear physicist who was instrumental in the development of the atomic bomb but who now has the mental capacity of a six-year-old--Johnny himself begins to have doubts regarding his own sanity and whether he'll even be able to crack the case, for he is only able to get anything from the patients in their fleeting lucid moments. The scenes that take place in the mental institution, which make up the heart of the film, are unrestrainedly disturbing and among the most powerful in any Fuller film. While filming some of the recollections of the patients, he inserts some color footage which provides a marked contrast with the claustrophobic mood of the rest of the film, conditioned as it is by the pale walls, shiny floors, and unending corridors of the mental institution. By cataloguing one man's immersion into the fragmented and subconscious side of life, Fuller also taps into the psyche of a nation whose very foundation was (and, to the extent that the film is still an accurate portrait of modern industrial society, continues to be) threatened by countless evils of its own making.
