036 - Shock Corridor, 1963, United States. Dir. Samuel Fuller.

Sunday, February 5, 2017

036 - Shock Corridor, 1963, United States. Dir. Samuel Fuller.

Who killed Sloane with a butcher knife in the kitchen?

No, this is not Clue.  This is Shock Corridor.  And Johnny Barrett really wants to know the answer.

He wants to know the answer so badly that he is willing to spend a year training himself to appear insane in the eyes medical health professionals.  His goal is to be institutionalized so that he can live among the patients of an asylum and query them to find out who committed the murder.

Then he can write about it and win the Pulitzer Prize.

At the very least he can write about his experiences under cover.  He can write articles, books, and screenplays.  He can become rich and famous.  He can be important.

Johnny wants it really badly.

To go along with him you may need to suspend your disbelief.  Willingly.

This is the third movie we have seen where a character is named John and is called Johnny.  The first was Alfred Hitchcock's Foreign Correspondent (1940), where John Jones (Johnny Jones) went undercover as Huntley Haverstock.  The second was Charles Laughton's The Night of the Hunter (1955), where the boy John Harper was called Johnny by his sister Pearl.  Here John Barrett is called Johnny by his girlfriend Cathy.

His girlfriend Cathy.

She thinks his idea is nuts.  She is trying to save up to have a normal life with a normal journalist.  She does not want to be away from him for so long.  He might be in the institution for a solid year.  Who knows what will happen?

Meanwhile, she is "singing in her skin" to make ends meet.  This means she is singing and dancing in a cabaret.  They call it stripping, but this is 1963.  She wears a modest, somewhat classy, bikini.  It is not what she wants to do.  It is not who she really is.  It is simply what she has willingly conceded to do to get by until Johnny can get established as a journalist and they can buy their starter home and begin their lives together.

Johnny succeeds in passing himself off as mentally ill, and he gets placed in the institution.

He will engage in interviews with three different patients.  Each will talk to him through the mind of whom he believes himself to be.  Then he will have a moment of clarity and provide Johnny with a clue.  Then he will fall back into his former state.  In other words, the characters are somewhat like the characters in Awakenings, where they go from their usual state to a short period of awakening and back to their usual state.  In this case, they are not catatonic but rather they believe they are someone they are not.

These are the three patients who prove to be "witnesses," as described in Johnny's voice-over directly to us:

Witness No. 1.  Stuart.  Farm boy from the Bible Belt.  Hobby: Playing Civil War games.  Believes he's General Jeb Stuart, Confederate hero of the Civil War.

Witness No. 2.  Trent.  Only Negro student in a southern university.  Hobby: Collecting pillowcases.

Witness No. 3.  Dr. Boden.  American physicist, Nobel Prize winner.  Worked on the atom bomb, the H-bomb.  The most brilliant scientist alive today.  Went insane working on nuclear fission--missiles and rockets to the moon.  Hobby: Drawing.  Now has the mentality of a child of six.

Each one takes up a section of the film.

James Best plays the character of Witness No. 1, Stuart.  Best is best known for playing Sheriff Roscoe P. Coltrane for seven seasons on the hit television series The Dukes of Hazzard.  He appeared in more than 70 movies and more than 100 television shows, and in nearly 300 episodes of those shows.  He also played in The Caine Mutiny with Humphrey Bogart.  He was an acting teacher in the 1970s and had quite a roster of students.  (Look them up.)  But it is for The Dukes of Hazzard that people remember him.  There is a good side to being in a situation like that: it established him in the public's mind and made him a household name.  But there is also a limiting side to it.  People may begin to think that is who you are and that is all you can do.

But is that accurate?

Consider a couple of other cases.

Remember when Greg Kinnear was getting started?  He hosted the shows College Mad House and Best of the Worst.  Then he was the host of Talk Soup for a few years, and people began to know who he was.  Then he was the host of Later with Greg Kinnear.  In his first movie role he played a Talk Show Host.  The public saw him as a talk show host and not an actor.  Then he played David Larrabee, the William Holden role in the Sabrina remake opposite Harrison Ford and Julie Ormond, but people did not consider that too big a stretch from the high-personality pretty boy persona he had come to be known for as a host.  After a couple of movies that lost money and nobody saw, he burst onto the scene as Simon Bishop in the James L. Brooks surprise hit As Good as It Gets.  He played opposite Jack Nicholson, Helen Hunt, and Cuba Gooding, Jr.  His character was an artist, gay, a dog owner, vulnerable, sensitive, intelligent, and a member of the new ragtag, semi-functional family together with Nicholson's OCD, prejudicial writer Melvin Udall and Hunt's burdened single mother of a sickly boy Carol Connelly.  The film was an international sensation, grossing more than $310 million on a $50 million budget, and was nominated for seven Academy awards, winning two (best actor for Nicholson and best actress for Hunt).  The writing of Mark Andrus and Brooks was taut and vital.  The story was different from anything anyone had scene.  The characters were individual and complex rather than stock.  I saw the film when it came out, in the theater.  The place was packed and the audience was fully engaged from beginning to end.  It is the best way to see a film--on the big screen, with great sound, socially, in a room full of strangers, who are giving energy back to the screen.  It was an intelligent film for intelligent people, and the people showed up and made the experience memorable.  It launched Greg Kinnear's career.

So what did people say about Greg Kinnear, who was nominated for an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor?  (He lost to Robin Williams for Good Will Hunting, who was also outstanding and playing against people's expectations.)  Of Greg Kinnear people said, "Who knew that this Talk Show Host was such a good actor?"

Who knew?

I will tell you who knew.

Greg Kinnear knew.  His acting teachers knew.  His agents knew.  The casting directors who believed in him knew.  The directors and producers who believed in him knew.  And his fellow actors knew.

An actor is an actor.  An actor can act.

We are talking here about people who train, people who work in the medium of film and television, where authenticity is key, where actors dig into the depths of the character's soul and play the role as though they are really living it.  Actors know each other.  They know who the others are and they know what the others can do.  And they do not ask, "Who knew he could do it?"  They already know he can do it.  Give him a chance and you will see.

Someone gave Greg Kinnear a chance.

Celebrities get to choose the roles they play, but most actors do not.  Most actors audition for everything or nearly everything their agents send to them.  They book some of those roles.  Then the public decides that whatever it is that they know them for is who they are and what they do.  But this is not necessarily accurate.  What if an actor gets started by booking Host roles.  Is that all he can do?  Or is that all you know him for?

Let us take another example.  How about Ned Beatty.  Beatty's case is different in that people who knew him already knew he was a great actor.  He started his film career with Deliverance.  What a way to begin!  Then he did sixteen more movies before playing Otis on Superman.  These include The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean, The Thief Who Came to Dinner, Nashville, All the President's Men, Network, Elaine May's Mickey and Nicky, the part-Mexican, part American Alimbrista!, and Gray Lady Down.  His credentials were amazing.  So when he played Otis in Superman, those who knew him were not going to wonder if he were any good.  But many people did not know him.  Consider the kind of movie Superman was--a summer blockbuster, one of the biggest films of the year, a movie for the masses.  There were many people who saw Superman who had never seen the other films I just listed.  It would be easy for them to think that Otis was who Ned Beatty was and represented what he could do--a dumb, bumbling, mindless minion of Lex Luther.  On top of that, he was surrounded by stellar talent, with Marlon Brando, Gene Hackman, Christopher Reeve, Jackie Cooper, and Glenn Ford making up the cast.  He could easily look one-note next to them in this film.

Might people think of James Best in a similar way?  His character on The Dukes of Hazzard has some similarities to Ned Beatty's character on Superman.  He is the follower of the villain, in this case Boss Hogg.  His job is to be obsequious, shallow, incompetent, bumbling.  He is not allowed to think for himself.  He is not allowed to have feelings, personal desires, individual human qualities, or vulnerabilities.  He is not allowed to love or be loved or even to desire love (except for maybe in a couple of episodes).  He is not granted the opportunity to develop a complex character.  He is there to be the foil of the leads, played by Tom Wopat and John Schneider, in order to make them look good.  His acting tasks are to project a limited amateurish physicality, to make faces, and to say a few anticipated (and loved!) catchphrases: "Fifty percent of fifty percent," "Freeze!" and "Git git git git."  And to lose every battle every time.

Is this terrible?  Not necessarily.  How many actors long for a role that will bring them to the attention of the American public, make them a household name, make them money, potentially secure them for life, and gave them a certain degree of recognition and caché when they go out in public.  On the other hand, no one wants to get stuck in the minds of others, especially casting directors, directors, and producers.

His performance here in Shock Corridor is strong.  While it may be a Southern character, Stuart, who thinks he is Jeb Stuart, it is layered and complex.  Best plays it straight and he plays it through his mental illness.  He has a moment of lucidity and then relapses.  He acts with his body, his mind, and his heart.

On another note, Samuel Fuller uses the great cinematographer Stanley Cortez for this film and for tomorrow's film.  We first met Cortez a few days ago on Sweet Smell of Success, where his darks were dark, his lights were light, and his edges were sharp as a paper cut.  Fuller does not have him shooting in quite that high contrast of a style.  Here we are more in the middle, with more grays and softer edges.  It may be the genre.  It may be the director's style.  Or it may be influenced by the budget.

But it still looks good.

They used special effects to extend the apparent length of the corridor.  They cast progressively shorter people, including little people, to work as extras in the hallway, creating a perspective which made the hall look longer than it was.

Fuller carefully planned all of his shots.  He storyboarded everything.  He knew exactly what he was going to shoot before he arrived on the day.  This made for some efficient and cost efficient filmmaking.  The film was shot in only 10 days!

Constance Towers gives an interview in the supplemental material on the disc, and her insights are satisfying.  She is a refined, intelligent woman, and she tells stories about how she was cast from meeting Fuller at a party and how they continued to be friends for life.  She will go from being a supporting player in this film to being the lead in tomorrow's film, and her range will be demonstrated.  Before working with Fuller, she had worked with John Ford in period films starring John Wayne, so she had been used to wearing long, conservative, period clothing.  Now she is a singer and strip-tease artist.  Tomorrow she will be a prostitute-turned-children's nurse (and bald!).  In the interview, she is elegant.  She had quite a range.

Samuel Fuller is a special kind of director.  Sometimes he worked independently, and sometimes he worked with the studios.  He and John Ford were friends, and since Constance Towers worked with both of them, Ford would come to set and watch Fuller direct her.  From what I gather it does not appear that Samuel Fuller tried to be iconoclastic but rather that he was practical.  He pursued such a strong, singular vision that sometimes he had to work outside the studios to get his movies made.  He made Westerns, action films, war films, films noir, psychological thrillers, and dramas.  He directed around 25 films, all of which he wrote all or in part, and he wrote around 20 films which someone else directed.

So how does Shock Corridor end?

Does our hero Johnny Barrett learn who killed Sloane?  Is he able to communicate with his newspaper?  Does he win the Pulitzer Prize?  Does he marry his girlfriend?  Does she quit stripping and settle down as a wife and mother, as she desires?

Watch and see.