Shock Corridor

For a look into a mental institution, one needs only go as far as One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.  It's a good look to, honest but sympathetic in most ways, well except for Nurse Ratchet that is.  Reading about 1963's Shock Corridor, I thought I was going into a similar story, the inner workings of a mental institution from the perspective of the patients.  When I saw Samuel Fuller directed the film, I was even more excited. That excitement wore off pretty quickly. This movie was bad from the start, dated and campy but not in a good way.  Instead, it ends up being surprisingly funny, but I'd assume for all the wrong reasons.

A movie that tries to explore social dilemmas, problems that should be dealt with, it has to be handled correctly or else the finished product is going to blow up on the launch pad.  I was surprised and not surprised this movie is held in high regard by moviegoers and critics alike.  For a movie released in 1963, it certainly does tackle some issues that were ahead of its time.  But the execution of it on top of the really bad acting and hackneyed dialogue end up crippling any chance of success this movie had. Maybe I'm just looking at it the wrong way, but I thought this movie was awful and couldn't wait to get through it.

A highly-regarded newspaper reporter, John Barrett (Peter Breck) has thought of a story idea that he's convinced will win him the Pulitzer Prize.  Recently, an unsolved murder occurred in a local mental institution, but the murderer was never found and the police gave up on the case (apparently). Barrett hopes to get himself committed to the place and piece things together from the inside. He goes through training so he can act like and appreciate what some of the patients will be going through. His girlfriend, Cathy (Constance Towers), poses as his sister who says her "brother" has made advances on her and has him committed. John goes along with it, feeling things out as he goes through therapy sessions -- some more extreme than the others -- trying to figure out what happened to the murdered patient. But as the clues come together, John begins to descend into his own madness. Can he figure out the murderer before it's too late for him?

I like Fuller as a director, but this was just a weird movie overall. It's off the wall and ridiculous, portraying the patients in such a bizarre way that the movie doesn't serve as a condemnation of mental institutions. Instead, it's more a big joke. One immensely obese patient (Larry Tucker) believes he is Pagliacci, constantly singing opera in the ward.  Some patients do nothing but sit all day in the hallway, "the street" dubbed by the staff where patients who have behaved get to interact and have some sense of freedom. That's where most of the movie takes place, in the hallway, Breck's John doing his best to figure out exactly what's happened. It never works though. The murder mystery is never really established (it's fairly easy to predict who the killer is) and feels like the script needed any excuse to put this respected journalist into an institution.

Watching Barrett basically fall apart day by day and week by week, I came to dislike the character more and more until finally I just decided I hated him. Part of that is the character's fault because he just isn't likable. The other part is that Breck delivers a downright bad performance. His stream of conscious narration is hilarious, and his two go-to moves to show he's going crazy is stoned silence with an empty stare or scream like toddler who isn't getting his way. He's so obsessively driven to pull the stunt off and get his story he becomes oblivious to his own issues. You know where it's going almost from the start, and it isn't going to end well for Barrett.  I'll also add this as someone with no medical experience or background. Are mental illnesses contagious? Can you catch some sort of sickness by just acting like you have said sickness? I realize he's basically imbedded himself in a world of crazy, but can that turn you crazy? I wouldn't think so, but the whole movie relies on that ridiculous (to me at least) premise.

Treading the ever so thin line between overacting and just delivering highly dramatic parts are three key supporting characters, the witnesses to the murder Barrett is trying to solve.  They include James Best, Fuller favorite Gene Evans, and Hari Rhodes. All sane men at some point, they all had breakdowns. Best was captured in Korea and brainwashed by the North Koreans and Chinese, returning never quite the same. Evans was a brilliant scientist who just snapped one day, his mind regressing back to his childhood days. Rhodes plays a black student who broke the color barrier at an all-white school, and now thinks he's white, terrorizing the black patients.  Each man is given a scene that delves into their mind (or what's left of it). If I had to recommend anything about this movie, it would be those three extended scenes.  They're intense (if a little overbearing) and feel like the one authentic thing going for this story.  On a sidenote, Barrett doesn't actually "investigate" anything. He talks to them, they rant for awhile, and he finally blurts out "Who killed Sloan?!?!" That's just good detective work there, sir! Good work.

All positives aside, there is much, MUCH more toward the negative. Constance Towers isn't a bad actress, but her character is mind-blowingly stupid. Pretending to be Barrett's sister who he's sexually interested in, she passionately kisses him during one of their visits at the institution.  Yes, I can appreciate she's worried about her boyfriend/fiance, but does she not see the problem in her actions? She flips out then when Barrett pushes her away.  Most of her part has her slinking around (she's a stripper for her day job) in Barrett's nightmares, convincing him that she's hooking up with other men while he's wasting away in the institution.  The moments of clarity patients go through are laughable and border on the pretentious. The breakdowns are laughable when they do happen, and made me laugh more than I was probably supposed to. The best though by far is Barrett accidentally stumbling into a ward for a certain type of female patients. He realizes who and what they are, his first thought via narration...."NYMPHOS!" They proceed to attack him in a truly awful but still funny scene which you can watch HERE.

I really did not know what to make of this movie. At one time effective, others so misplayed that the movie comes across like a camp classic.  Maybe because there was some potential here that the end result is that much more disappointing.  Stretching for a positive is an increased role for Chuck Roberson, John Wayne's stunt double and one of the most talented stunt men in the business.  If you've seen a Wayne movie from the 1960s, I guarantee you've seen Roberson whether you know it or not.  He plays Wilkes, one of the institution's attendants who tries to help Barrett through his struggles.  It's a small part, but one of the bigger ones Roberson had in an impressive career, rivaling his screentime in 1960's The Alamo.  Still, it's a minor positive in a sea of major negatives.

Shock Corridor <---trailer (1963): */****

Fate is the Hunter

When I think of disaster movies, I think The Poseidon Adventure and other 1970s epically bad but still enjoyable movies with huge casts of stars and dated special effects.  Through the 1950s and 1960s, disaster movies were made, just not on the same scale.  Only part of 1964's Fate is the Hunter really matches up with any of the criteria for a disaster flick, but it foreshadows what was to come in the coming decades as audiences watched planes crash, earthquakes tear apart the world, towering buildings go up in flames and much, much more.

Director Ralph Nelson takes control of the helms here in this quasi-disaster flick which is both ahead of its time in storytelling but also very dated at times.  Nelson is one of those hidden gems of a director you stumble across every so often.  He was never pigeon-holed into one specific type of movie and ended up directing films across countless genres.  Action, western, drama, comedy, message movies, he tried them all and did them all well.  Never flashy but always getting the job done in above average fashion, Nelson doesn't have a true classic to his name, but his filmography is nonetheless littered with worthwhile movies.

On a flight from Los Angeles to Seattle, veteran pilot Capt. Jack Savage (Rod Taylor) and his crew run into mechanical problems and are forced to crash land on a beach, the jet airliner exploding on contact with a pier running across the beach. Everyone on board other than one stewardess (Suzanne Pleshette) is killed, and the public, the corporation, and the media want answers.  What happened that caused Savage to attempt such a difficult maneuver? All evidence points to pilot error being the cause, but airline executive, former pilot and friend of Savage's, Sam McBane (Glenn Ford), thinks something else happened. Time is running out though, and McBane must prove Savage's innocence before a board of inquiry pins the blame on the deceased pilot.

Wasting little time surprising the viewer, Nelson kills off star Rod Taylor before the credits even roll.  Just when you think Taylor's Savage has successfully landed his jet airliner carrying 49 passengers...BOOM! The plane explodes, and 'Fate is the Hunter' pops up on the screen.  Talk about a tone-setter. No worries though for Taylor fans, this is not the last we'll see of him.  His involvement in the movie from there on in besides his character being constantly talked about is through flashbacks that flesh him out as an individual.  It's those little bits of character that should help us decide if this experienced, always calm and capable pilot was really incapable of dealing with what seemed like a minor mechanical issue.  Long story short, don't miss the first 10 minutes, or you'll be lost.

The problem any movie faces when it has such a strong start is sustaining that energy over the length of the movie.  That's where 'Hunter' struggles.  The investigation is interesting enough because it's hard not to be curious about what actually caused the plane to malfunction in such a surprising way.  But Ford's questioning gets tedious quickly.  The flashbacks are beyond tedious and serve only to make Savage more of a 3-D character.  After the first flashback, it becomes too much.  We get it.  He's a good pilot who is cocky, arrogant, not always likable and quite the ladies man.  But is a movie really going to peg Taylor as a boozehound who caused the deaths of over 50 people? I think not.  It's not a matter of if, it's a matter of how Taylor didn't crash the plane because he was drunk. 

Worse than that though (as a Lost fan I can appreciate even the slowest of flashbacks) is the direction Ford's character and the story takes overall in the final half hour.  Now granted, the word 'Fate' is in the movie's title.  As the evidence comes together and Ford's McBane talks to all these possible witnesses, he begins to question if maybe, just maybe, fate played a role in that plane crashing.  An out of season bird may have flown into the engine, three other planes were all off-schedule by a few minutes, the pier was supposed to have been removed a week earlier, it just doesn't add up.  Was something else at play here? Ford's testimony is even worse when he admits all this.  I can't tell if it is just all too sappy or handled poorly, but if Nelson was trying to deliver a message with this change in direction it didn't work.  I haven't read the source novel to know one way or another, but the ending disappoints on a lot of levels.

The redeeming factor through all the negatives is the impressive cast assembled here.  Ford is never flashy but is as reliable as always with Taylor making the most of his posthumous part...in character at least. Pleshette has a small but integral part (and looks great by the way). Also look for Nancy Kwan, Constance Towers, Jane Russell in a cameo as herself in 1945, Nehemiah Persoff, an uncredited Dorothy Malone, Max Showalter, Wally Cox and many more recognizable faces even if you don't know their name. Other than the cast and some nice-looking black and white camerawork, I struggled to get through this movie.  Potentially good but never amounts to anything much.

Fate is the Hunter <---trailer (1964): **/****

Sergeant Rutledge

Movie credits before a film starts wouldn't seem like something that would be upsetting, but this one bothered me.  And maybe upsetting isn't the right word, but here goes.  An actor stars in a movie with the key role, the most important of all the cast, and even has the movie named after that character.  Where do you think he should be billed?  If you guessed fourth, well, you're nuts.  So goes Woody Strode and his performance in 1960's Sergeant Rutledge. 

Since I saw him in Spartacus as Kirk Douglas' sparring partner in the gladiator ring, I've been a fan of Woody Strode.  An imposing physical presence, the former UCLA football star turned to movies and made a career out of playing roles that typically needed him to be large and imposing while forsaking his actual acting ability.  Strode shows off that ability in a career-best performance in this John Ford directed western and somehow gets fourth billing.  Maybe it was because he wasn't the biggest star or name actor, but I think it's ridiculous that he's hidden below in the credit sequence at the beginning of the movie.  Credits be damned, the performance is a keeper.

For seven years, Lt. Tom Cantrell (Jeffrey Hunter) has served as an officer with the 9th Cavalry on the American frontier, including working often with First Sergeant Braxton Rutledge (Strode), the top soldier in the outfit.  Now, Cantrell finds himself defending Rutledge in a trial with a rape and two murder charges pinned against him.  But the Lt. knows this man too well to believe what's being said about him, but now he has to prove the man's innocence against a rabid prosecutor (Carleton Young) and the presiding army judge (Willis Bouchey).  With everything stacked against him, Cantrell does his best to present the truth through a series of witnesses and flashbacks that show what really happened.

This is quite a departure for Ford that saw movies later in his career try to deliver more of a message about the old west, racism here, myth and legend in 'Liberty Valance,' and Indian mistreatment in Cheyenne Autumn. On top of that, this isn't a typical Ford cavalry western.  He takes a crack at doing a courtroom drama with some mixed results, but overall it works.  He uses a handful of lighting techniques while shooting the trial, lots of light and pitch-black dark, as the story morphs into flashbacks which split time in some studio sets and Ford's stomping ground, Monument Valley. Of course, it is a Ford movie, and he gets a couple 'Ford-isms' in, like a group of tittering, tottering old ladies led by Billie Burke and then Judson Pratt's drinking, card shark of an officer filling in not so admirably for the recently passed Victor McLaglen.  Little things like that are annoying, but not a movie killer.

In terms of story, this is one of Ford's better ventures.  He blends the flashback of Rutledge's arrest and the patrol getting him back to the fort with the actual courtroom testimony.  The patrol flashback is Ford hitting a home run, scenes where you expect John Wayne to ride in off the horizon.  Working with Ford for a third time, Hunter is excellent as Lt. Cantrell, an officer who must balance his personal beliefs with what the army is telling him.  Leading the patrol, Cantrell wavers over whether to let Rutledge just ride away rather than face a trial.  Constance Towers is along as Mary Beecher, a young woman coming back to visit her father only to find she's traveled into an Apache uprising. Cantrell's patrol includes a fair share of uncredited actors playing the black cavalry troopers -- they're not listed ANYWHERE -- with Juano Hernandez's Sgt. Skidmore the only representative, a good part as a former slave turned cavalry trooper. 

Not quite as comfortable as the outdoor patrol scenes is the courtroom drama.  For most of the movie, these quick snippets serve as nothing more than a way to get at the patrol storyline.  But every so often, we get that Ford humor which drives me nuts, the group of sophisticated older women who gasp and sigh at every other thing said, or Pratt's Lt. character hamming it up as part of the review board.  Bouchey's Colonel Fosgate does his best to remain order in a nice supporting part, and Young goes to town as Capt. Shattuck, the possibly racist prosecutor.  The last act comes together a little too quickly for my liking -- the reveal of the real killer is almost a throwaway -- as Cantrell pieces it all together.  But that's almost gravy, you're sure from the start Strode's Sgt. Rutledge DID NOT kill his commanding officer and rape a white woman.

He's Woody Strode, of course he didn't do those things.  Usually relegated to background characters, Strode hits all the right notes here with a part that allows him to show off his skills -- and not just physically.  His first introduction is of a rough but capable trooper trying to save Towers' life from two marauding Apache warriors.  When questioned in the field, he refuses to cooperate, thinking the noose is waiting for him no matter what he says.  The highlight of the performance is Rutledge on the witness stand as the sergeant explains why he comes back.  It is a quick outburst but a very moving one.  Strode was never better than he was here, his performance making up for any other issues I may have with this western. He certainly delivered higher billing, even if it was only ahead of Burke's annoying performance.

Sergeant Rutledge <----TCM trailer (1960): ***/****