Shock Corridor

Samuel Fuller's most extreme film. Johnny Barrett is a journalist who wants to solve a murder committed in a mental hospital and win a Pulitzer. To do it he fakes insanity and arranges to be committed. His girlfriend plays his sister and a doctor files the false report. Inside there are three witnesses, all of whom have lost their minds: a soldier who was captured in Korea and changed sides, a Black student who, after being targeted by a racist mob, believes himself a member of the Ku Klux Klan, and a physicist who helped build the atom bomb and has reverted to the mind of a child. Fuller distributes three American wounds among three patients. The film is black and white with colour inserts: Fuller used his own 16mm travel footage for the hallucination sequences. Peter Breck plays Barrett and Constance Towers his girlfriend. Cheap, fast and coarse, with no claim to delicacy. An important work for anyone interested in American independents and in doing politics through genre. Its depiction of mental illness, seen now, is entirely crude.