"Shock Corridor" (1963) and "The Naked Kiss" (1964)

                                 Shock Corridor and The Naked Kiss are two of the many Samuel Fuller features that have been released by Criterion (though they still haven't released The Big Red One, which is probably my favorite movie of his) and are often paired together because they were both distributed by Allied Artist Pictures, a company specializing in low-budget films that Fuller briefly worked for after his stint with the big studio companies. Fuller is considered one of the more under-appreciated filmmakers in the latter half of the 20th century, influencing a who's who of directors like Quentin Tarantino and Martin Scorsese. He worked under low budgets, tried his hand at different genres from Westerns to war flicks to film noirs, and tackled hard-hitting contemporary issues (told in a clear-eyed, blunt, tabloid-like style; Fuller was a newspaper reporter before he became a filmmaker). He also smoked giant Cuban cigars. You can literally Google image Samuel Fuller and find that every picture is him holding a long stogie that's bigger than his hand.
                                 Shock Corridor tells the story of Johnny, a newspaper reporter (played by Peter Breck) going undercover as a mental patient in an insane asylum in order to uncover the mystery of a murder that occured there. He believes this is Pulitzer Prize-winning material (which is laughable; I have a better chance of winning a Pulitzer for this blog than he would for uncovering some who-cares murder) and this provokes the ire of his burlesque dancer girlfriend (played by Constance Towers) who thinks he is crossing a line.
                                 As he navigates his way through the mental hospital, Johnny interrogates three of the witnesses to the murder, each with their own psychosis: a Communist sympathizer who sees himself as a Confederate general, a black man who sees himself as a white supremacist, and a former nuclear scientist whose emotional maturity is akin to a kindergartner (all forming a triptych of contemporary issues of the day: the Red Scare, racism, and nuclear annihilation). Each of the witnesses reveal their accounts of the murder in brief moments of lucidity. At the same time, Johnny slowly begins to lose his grip on reality and starts to become insane himself.
                                 Shock Corridor is intense, provocative, and unruly; a movie that feels like a defiant middle finger to Hollywood mores. It's a unique experiment that prefigures the New Hollywood movement...well, more in theme than execution. It is also a low budget B-movie, with all the melodramatic trappings. If Fuller had a mantra, it would have been, 'subtlety be damned'. He was a newspaperman in the most literal sense. Even if you look at the poster above, it has the look of a explosive front page tabloid. To get a story across, you need an attention-getter!
                                 Visually, it has a lot going for it. Because of the low budget, the film has a flat, stagey look to it which, as Scorsese points out in a documentary about Fuller, makes the experience more confined and psychological. There's also some surreal moments that brought to mind David Lynch, not just because they're surreal, but because they're campily surreal. That image of a mini Constance Towers superimposed over a sleeping Peter Breck reminded me a bit of the lady in the radiator from Eraserhead. Even Towers doing her little burlesque act has a bit of an underground seediness not that unsimilar from Blue Velvet or Twin Peaks.
                                 As visceral a filmmaker as Fuller was, the film works purely on the level of allegory and because of that, it's not as emotionally involving as I think it wants to be. I think Breck's character arc is unique, in that he starts off as a selfish glory hound who becomes less ignorant of social problems (the asylum an obvious allegory for America), but this new knowledge doesn't make him a better person, but rather it makes him crazy and complacent. As interesting as this type of character arc and story-telling is, it's the sledge-hammering of themes that takes me out out it.
                                It's not a great film, but it's a daring experiment that stands out among its 60's B-movie companions.

                             His 1964 follow-up The Naked Kiss follows Constance Towers (once again) as a prostitute named Kelly who moves to a little town and tries to turn her life around as a nurse helping handicapped children. While there, she falls in love with J.L. Grant, the rich descendent of the town's founders and is being watched suspiciously by the police captain Griff, who doesn't like former prostitutes.
                            This feature was a bit of a step down from Shock Corridor, sort of a ham-fisted commentary on how society views women. The one part that people always take away from the film is the first five minutes which are definitely the most memorable. It starts off with Towers beating up one of her clients with her purse. In the middle of the action, Towers' wig falls off to reveal a shaven head. It's violent, bizarre, and abrupt; an attention-getting opening to a film.
                             Other than that, it's the standard story of a woman of low repute trying to make good told with the same lack of subtlety as Shock Corridor, only not as compelling and more nonsensical. Later on in the film, Grant is revealed to be a child molester so Kelly impulsively kills him out of repulsion. She is arrested and tries to prove to Griff that Grant was a pervert by finding the girl he attempted to molest. They find the girl and Kelly is let go, regardless of the fact that she committed a murder.
                            Unless you're really into trashy Douglas Sirk-esque melodrama, I'd give this one a pass.