Shock Corridor

Sam Fuller
1963
Multiple Viewings

While not a detective/crime story in the strictest sense, this is a must see for any fan of pulp/noir cinema. With it's cornerstones firmly laid in dimestore-novel dialogue and shallow pop psychology "Shock Corridor" is a permanent trip to the looney bin. A Pulitzer-crazy journalist fakes madness to check into the funny farm in order to solve the murder of an orderly witnessed by three patients. On the inside he struggles to keep his sanity while getting closer to the truth. The depictions of mental illness are one dimensional at best, but in the best way possible: a black man believes he's a Klansman, a communist defector fancies himself a civil war general, and one of the A-bomb's premier developers has regressed to a childlike state of innocence and naivety. Thrown in for more color is the obese opera singing Pagliacci (played by one of my all-time favorite character actors Larry Tucker), a room full of lusty nymphomaniacs, and a stripper girlfriend trying to save her fella from himself. The no frills black and white photography gets supplemented with bursts of colorful stock footage during the height of patients' mad rants - a nice gimmick for sure. Sam Fuller's certainly done a lot of great films, but this one is nearly perfect.