Shock Corridor

"The only difference between me and a madman is that I'm not mad," says Dalí, Samuel Fuller takes the plunge ahead of Wiseman (Titicut Follies). Anything for a Pulitzer, for the relentless journalist (Peter Breck) it means going undercover and getting lost in the asylum, a mind for a scoop. The stunt is to pose as an incestuous maniac, his girlfriend (Constance Towers) has her part to play when not doffing feather boas at the strip club. "Hamlet was made for Freud, not you!" The mental institution is the body that houses the shivers, a shoestring set whipped for one stark wonder after another—gesticulating silhouettes on blank walls, a trompe-l'oeil for the illusory vanishing point down the hall, a collective inner life encircled by Stanley Cortez's shadows. "Psychological warfare" at home, the catatonic arm raised into a fascist salute. "Now he's the Statue of Liberty." The distillate of Fuller vehemence, Sartre's "frenzy on the wall" ran to cracked extremes. Patients, witnesses, deformed American traumas. The Korean War vet (James Best) whistles "Dixie" and balances pills on a Gettysburg map, the nuclear scientist (Gene Evans) plays hide and seek and scribbles with crayons. The Black student (Hari Rhodes) fashions a Ku Klux Klan hood out of a pillow cover and spews white supremacist bile, "burn that freedom bus," the screen splits with him and the protagonist side by side in straitjackets. (Each gets a flash of clarity, just enough to perceive that derangement is the true norm.) "That same nightmare, always in color." Franju's La Tête Contre les Murs is a contrasting precedent, the cannibalistic paroxysm in the nympho ward points up Mankiewicz's Suddenly, Last Summer. The primal scream leaves the opera buff unimpressed, the prize at the end of the corridor is a comatose embrace. "I only draw what I see." Scorsese in Shutter Island has his own metaphorical dungeon to tour. With Larry Tucker, Paul Dubov, Chuck Roberson, Bill Zuckert, John Matthews, Neyle Morrow, and Philip Ahn. In black and white.