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• Shock Corridor (1963)

  • Bruce Reber
  • 6/28/10

  I watched "Shock Corridor" on TCM Saturday night 6/26/10 as part of their lineup of films dealing with mental institutions and the mentally ill. Host Robert Osborne said in his intro that director Sam Fuller thought of "Shock Corridor" as a commentary on the state of America and where we at as a society in the early 60's. I totally agree, as it shows an investigative reporter trying to win a Pulitzer prize by faking insanity to get himself admitted to a mental hospital in order to solve a murder committed there. He is released and wins the prize, but because he was so driven to achieve success at any cost he ends up recommitted to the hospital, psychologically devastated by the horrors he was forced to endure. It also deals with racism in Trent, the African-American who enrolled in a white college and endured bigotry and harassment, and as a result now imagines himself a Ku Klux Klansman shouting the racist epithets that drove him into insanity. It deals with Cold War paranoia in Boden, the once prominent nuclear physicist who was responsible for building nuclear weapons, and the realization that his work has brought the world to the brink of annihilation has caused him to regress to childhood. "Shock Corridor" ends with this epilogue -"Whomever God Wishes To Destroy He First Makes Mad".

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