#19 - The Shock Corridor

#19 is the Samuel Fuller film he made before The Naked Kiss  - (which was the last movie we reviewed) - It's a slightly different take - about a journalist who goes undercover into a mental hospital to find the identity of a killer and win the Pulitzer.

There's some stellar scenes in here - One is of an African-American who thinks he is a white segregationist  (driven mad by pressure brought upon him trying to INTEGRATE into a school where he was harassed) - in one scene he's giving a vicious speech about the dangers of the "Negro" and Tim Robbins said later that Fuller told him he didn't write that speech.  It was lifted from the congressional record.    That's just a LITTLE renegade there :)

Another scene which I had been cued in on from the Naked Kiss DVD was the scene where he has a clear mental break and thinks it's raining in the hall - but for me the scenes that stuck out were the long conversational scenes between him and the inmates who may have seen the crime - There's just some wild creative dialogue flowing there - and all three of the men he interviewed, whoever they were then, cracked under pressures and strains we would all by sympathetic to I think, to some degree.  

Of course, this is pulp fiction to a degree - real people don't go mad or go thru what some of them did - but I do remember the story of one of my favorite songwriters, Townes Van Zandt, who went thru such intensive shock therapy in his early 20's that he could no longer remember his childhood, so there was SOME hell going on back then

Sadly, this is a very old print of the DVD, so there were no extras,  unless u want the colorbars in a black and white film :)  but Criterion has re-released it with another interview with Constance Towers (who had a leading role in this film) and you can always find most of the film essays on the site

Speaking of old, 7 of the next 10 films in the list are out of print - so suffice it to say, there won't be a lot of extras there either - and Robocop?   What the frack - but we'll work our way thru the list with a deeper appreciation of this American Director, Writer, and Producer in our repertoire now