Samuel Fuller is one of those typical figures of the new Hollywood cinema of the 50s-60s; a "counter" cinema, polemical, dealing with scandalous and difficult themes, aiming to "show the worm under the rock," as David Lynch would say, yet someone who was still part of the American film industry, part of American society, proving he belonged to that society even when he criticized it harshly.

Samuel Fuller was a typical genre director, one who wrote his own stories and also shot them on tight budgets, someone who, like many protestors, had to deal with the "witch hunt" against communists, but ultimately someone who managed to express, for better or worse, his ideas, and who after the '60s became highly appreciated even by Cahiers du Cinema. "Shock Corridor" is not only Fuller's most successful film, it is also one of the most beautiful films about madness and how madness is tied to history, and to people's lives in an indissoluble yet disturbing manner.

The film's protagonist, Johnny Barrett (Peter Breck) is an ambitious journalist who decides to write a sensational report, aiming to discover who committed a brutal unsolved murder inside a mental institution. To do this, he must feign insanity and get admitted, so he can investigate undisturbed in that world completely closed off from the outside and solve the murder. In agreement with a doctor and his girlfriend, he pretends to be a sexual maniac, and soon after, he is committed. The audience is thus catapulted into a muffled and surreal world where everything is illogical and confused, guided only by the protagonist’s "inner" voice; Barrett tries to make contact with potential witnesses of the crime, essentially aligning himself with their minds clouded by madness: he meets Stuart (James Best) obsessed with the Civil War; he encounters Trent (Hari Rhodes), a black man who proclaims white supremacy; and finally, Pagliacci (Larry Trucker), a former nuclear physicist driven mad after building the hydrogen bomb, who can only communicate through childish drawings.

The "madmen" Barrett meets are nothing but the great dark sides of America: war, racism, nuclear threat: the American "madness" that Milligan and Bachalo so well incarnated visually in the "American Scream" on the pages of Shade. Barrett doesn’t confront another madness: his own. Ambition, the desire to reach ever higher, slowly becomes his dark side, and the protagonist seems to be gradually enveloped by it, like by darkness. If the plot (with Fuller being the author himself) is already disturbing per se, the staging is often astonishing, because of the choice to "show everything," both the real and the hallucination, eventually merging them into one single vision. Simply incredible is the evocative power of the scene where Trent sees himself as a KKK capo, or the scenes where Barrett increasingly often sees his girlfriend, dancing beside him. A big untold theme is societal sexophobia, which spills over into the reverse society of the asylum: Barrett’s girlfriend is a striptease dancer, who seduces the protagonist in dreams and makes him jealous; the protagonist, lost in the asylum, ends up in the "pen" of the nymphomaniacs, while a warden smiles sardonically, suggesting other things. Lost in hallucinatory delirium, Barrett solves the crime, but it becomes a secondary fact now: he must try to save his mind now.

And his soul: the asylum director is named, none other than Dr. Christ.

Loading comments  slowly