Shock Corridor (1963)

Shock Corridor (UR) - Review

"BZZZZZT"

As always director Samuel Fuller was way ahead of the curve with this one.  It predates the film adaptation of One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest by almost a decade.  Its the story of a journalist who decides to go undercover at a mental hospital to get to the bottom of a murder that was committed there.  Johnny is his name and he succeeds in getting himself committed by convincing the psychiatrists that he is sexually deviant and incestuously in love with his "sister" who in reality is just his stripper girlfriend.  She's afraid that being among all those lunatics will rub off on Johnny, and so it does to great shock value and melodramatic effect.  Old fashioned acting and cornball antics aplenty here, patients who are mad as hatters and speaking in tongues )all very taboo subjects in the early 60s I'm sure).  It's the undertone, the implied horrors and the grim mood that Fuller captures here effectively.  When one inmate (who thinks he is a Civil War Rebel) breaks through his mental fugue and starts to spill the beans on the murder we see his mind open and his secrets about being a POW and tortured in the Korean War is exceptionally chilling/captivating (impressive with such an over the top performance and role).  This is Fuller at his pulp crime best and for its time it must have indeed been shocking to have a film be so frank about race and the treatment of the mentally ill, even if its used for over dramatic purposes.  Schlocky need not always have such bad connotations.

6.5 Loony Bins out of 10 (GOOD)

Underworld U.S.A. (1961)

Underworld U.S.A. (NR)

A street-wise kid witnesses the murder of his father in a shady alley on New Years Eve, and some twenty years later is finally seeking a cold blooded revenge that can only exist in Sam Fuller's gritty old fashioned crime story Underworld U.S.A.

Tully Devlin (played with machismo by Cliff Robertson) is low rent hood that has spent his youth in orphanages/reformatories and jail.  Knowing only one of the four men who killed his father by name, Tully gets himself arrested again when he finds out the killer, Vic, is dying in prison.  Tully begins to exact a "Yojimbo" like vengeance, setting the criminals on themselves yet Tully is no anti-hero.  He is a street rat through and through, violent and selfish and beyond redemption.  Only a former-prostitute caught up in his ring of deception can melt his hell bent heart in a sad grey-widow kind of way, but will it lead to his destruction?

Old fashioned in all the right ways (feels much more 50s than 60s), the writing is punchy and over stylized, the cinematography graphical and stark, the acting sweaty and grim.  It's all the hallmarks of a good Fuller film, a man whose earlier career in criminal reporting really lends itself to the material.  In his hands Tully's character doesn't resort to the same old tropes to be a likeable thug, he is a full-on hardened criminal without regrets and yet his revenge kick is completely relatable and the under handed way he goes about it is somehow commendable.  Even when he laughs at the idea of marrying Cuddles the whore, or tricking the police into getting his enemies killed, he's still a likeable lout that is still without a redeeming quality.  Perhaps since he's a paragon of virtue compared to the real bad guys, sunglasses wearing assassins in Cadillacs with no conscience about feeding heroin to school girls on bicycles.  Tully meanwhile is the perfect Fuller prototype "hero," a raw knuckled down on his luck everyman who despite a lifelong commitment to crime, its all by circumstance and he still has a few veins of pure gold in his scarred black heart, leaving him perilously just a few steps away from getting greased for his humanity.

7.5 Rolling Drunk Punks out of 10 (GOOD)