Shock Corridor

Samuel Fuller was a one-of-a-kind American director—a mix of street intellectual, tabloid journalist, and pulp-fiction artist whose melodramas and genre pictures featured trailblazing social commentary. Shock Corridor (1963), one of his most striking and unusual films, is a murder mystery starring Peter Breck as Johnny Barrett, an ambitious reporter who goes undercover in an insane asylum to find a killer but instead unearths a microcosm of American ills among the catatonic patients escaping their sins and traumas through delusion. These include a nuclear scientist whose guilt over building the A-bomb has turned him into a child, a war deserter who thinks he's a Confederate officer, and the first black man in a newly desegregated college who cracks under the pressure and winds up believing he's a hate-mongering white supremacist. Fuller also tosses sexual hysteria and repression into the mix, driving his points home with a cinematic jackhammer. While the combination of lurid excess and art film expressionism was dismissed by most critics at the time, Fuller has since been recognized as a genuine independent. Previously released by Criterion in a movie-only edition, this newly remastered release on DVD and Blu-ray features extras including Adam Simon's affectionate 1996 Fuller profile “The Typewriter, the Rifle and the Movie Camera,” an interview with costar Constance Towers, and a booklet. Highly recommended. (S. Axmaker)