Features: DVD
Seeking a Pulitzer Prize, a reporter has himself committed to a mental hospital to investigate a murder. As he closes in on the killer, madness closes in on him. Auteur Samuel Fuller masterfully charts the uneasy terrain between sanity and dementia.Click here for more Criterion favorites!
Editor's Note
Samuel Fuller's honest, visionary pulp film uses an insane asylum as a metaphor for American society. The inmates include a black man who thinks he's a white supremacist, a Korean War Vet who thinks he's a Civil War Confederate general, and a nuclear physicist who has reverted to childhood. This microcosm, which Fuller created in 1963, has lost none of its force over time. In addition, the film's treatment of journalistic hubris foreshadows the contemporary problem of media becoming corrupted by its compliant association with governmental elites. In SHOCK CORRIDOR, a journalist (Peter Breck) hoping to get a scoop on a murder suspect has himself committed to a mental institution where the inmates have information on the culprit. As the film unfolds, the purity of the hero's mission is undercut by his own monomaniacal ego. Things go terribly awry, and although he gets his story, he pays a high price for his success.
Plot Summary
In Sam Fuller's honest, visionary pulp film, Johnny Barrett (Breck), a journalist in search of a hard-hitting feature, voluntarily commits himself to a mental institution. While confined, however, he loses his grip on reality. With Breck's moving performance, the character of Johnny becomes one of the great doomed figures of modern day film noir.
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