by Daniel White
Film critic Andrew Sarris trumpeted Samuel Fuller's Shock Corridor (1963) as being, "an allegory of America...not so much surreal as sub-real in Its hallucinatory view of history. " Wow, pretty heady stuff. I came away thinking it was over. Not over as in finished and done with, but over as in overwrought, overripe, and most definitely over-the-top. I have been watching quite a lot of Sam Fuller's films over the past year or so, and I gotta hand it to the guy, he is one interesting cat. A sensationalist who prefers a blow torch to a Bic lighter, he may not always make great flicks, but he never fails to entertain. He's as close to an auteur as you can get in a collaborative medium like cinema.
In this nutty freak fest Peter Breck plays Johnny Barrett, a newspaper reporter who goes undercover in an insane asylum to crack a murder case. Constance Towers plays his stripper girlfriend, Cathy (what, she couldn't be a stenographer in a typing pool? ) who poses as his sister. She has him committed for having the hots for her! Sarris may have thought this was the last word in edgy, thought-provoking fodder for the intelligentsia of filmdom. To me it's punchy, smutty, and goofball fun. It certainly isn't dull. This study in screwball cinema is a version of Camp. It's Camp with Towers undulating as a burlesque dolly while warbling a torch song. It's a ward full of nymphos attacking our hero and nearly cannibalizing him. It's a pair of lovers posing as siblings and pretending to be... well, lovers!
Yes, the movie has plenty of deep and meaningful things to say about, race, war, and nuclear arms. But I couldn't hear them, Constance Towers feathery boa was making too much noise. Available on YouTube.
No comments:
Post a Comment