We have too many intellectuals who are afraid to use the pistol of common sense.
- Dr. Boden
Sam Fuller – that bold, brash, cantankerous, get-the-story-first copy boy turned movie maverick must seem like a relic in today’s day and age; a man whose movies and ideology may be gone by the way of typewriters and print media. With his wide, down-turned, elongated mouth supporting a well-moistened stogie, he looks and sounds like a parody of Classic Hollywood pic-tcha makers. His story telling is infectious and inspiring. Funny and blunt. His best observations have the subtly of a musket blast to the kisser. Fuller reveled in stirring the shit with his provocative yarns and his 1963 opus Shock Corridor is his most daring and unapologetic.
If Sam Fuller were still alive today, I wonder what he would think of the nation he so dearly loved and fought for. Our massive deficit, class warfare instigated by the rich, Tea Party Libertarians, Rick Perry, yada yada yada. Shock Corridor was his direct response to his view with America in the 60s. A country bubbling with rage, ignorance and a resistance to change. Over forty years later, ignorance is bottle fed to the masses while rage has been replaced with complacency. Sam wouldn’t be posting about these national injustices and hypocrisies on Facebook, or laughing smugly alongside The Daily Show newscast. No sir, he would make a goddamn movie about it.
As he recounts in his autobiography A Third Face: My Tale of Writing, Fighting and Filmmaking, Shock Corridor originated as a script that he pitched to Fritz Lang in the late 40s about a journalist trying to solve a murder that was committed in a mental hospital. Fuller was observing the changing nation around him – the scars left behind by Joseph McCarthy, The Civil Rights Movement and nuclear warfare. He revamped his decade-old script to the newly christened Shock Corridor and made a film to deliberately provoke its audience. He writes, “My madhouse was a metaphor for America. Like an X ray that fathoms a patient’s tumor, Shock Corridor would probe our nation’s sickness. Without an honest diagnosis of the problems, how could we ever hope to heal them?”
Shock Corridor never healed the nation. But when viewed today, its invigorating to see a filmmaker rattle some cages, even if the message only reaches the back row of the movie theater. Its potent cocktail of madness, sex, psychotherapy, racism and murder still packs the walop the director was striving for. It’s depressing that there aren’t movies (or the men who made them) like this anymore.
