Raw sensationalism on a shoe-string: Shock Corridor and The Naked Kiss on DVD and BD

For those who invest their hours in the careful examination of cinematic artfulness, Sam Fuller’s best movies have a way of grabbing your presumptions by the throat, throwing them out the window, kicking them down the street, and setting fire to them just before they get run over by a truck. Fuller was a master of raw, unbridled sensationalism. His method of social critique was to lunge at a sensitive subject before dragging it half-conscious into the hot-lit arena. His work prompts us not to forgo the appreciation of cinematic elegance but to redefine it. A black mental patient convinces himself he’s a white supremacist and leads a posse of fellow inmates howling down a corridor to exact a mock-lynching, or a bald-headed prostitute beats her drunken pimp to the floor with a spike-heeled shoe, and we’re hurtled into a territory where tenderness is the progeny of audacity, where emotional precision emerges from melodrama, and where poetry rises out of action like smoke signals. “If anything irritates anyone,” Fuller once declared, “that makes me happy.”

Criterion’s new editions of Shock Corridor (1963) and The Naked Kiss (64) form a sort diptych portrait of Fuller’s transition from a career forged partly within the studios to one of arduous independence. Low-budget, sparely furnished, continuity-negligent and starkly illuminated—with photography from the great Stanley Cortez, who shot The Magnificent Ambersons (42) and The Night of the Hunter (55)—these movies prowled the greasy peripheries of American life for tales of murder and prostitution, corrupt public services and pedophilia, incest and repressed rage. The discs feature numerous terrific supplements, including an episode of The South Bank Show that finds its featured guest Fuller in top-form, but their most inspired elements are the illustrations that adorn their packaging and screen menus, courtesy of Daniel Clowes, author of the graphic novels Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron (93), Ghost World (97), and David Boring (00). Enveloping these movies in Clowes’ art enables us to better appreciate the graphically dynamic, sophisticated comic book quality of Fuller’s work.

Shock Corridor opens and closes with an epigram from Euripides that implicitly instructs us to regard what unfolds here as myth rather than mere realism or social commentary. It’s about an ambitious reporter named Johnny Barrett (Peter Breck) who pretends to have sexually assaulted his sister so as to gain admission to a mental hospital where a patient was murdered by a still-unidentified assailant. The woman reluctantly posing as the victimized sibling is actually Johnny’s girlfriend Cathy (Constance Towers), an unhappy burlesque dancer whose nightly act is captured in an extended long shot that renders Cathy puny and isolated, her choreography far more awkward and tawdry than would a conventional montage of close-ups and medium shots. In one of the movie’s masterstrokes, Fuller then revisits the burlesque act during Johnny’s institutionalized nightmares, in which a miniature ghost version of Cathy dances scantily-clad around Johnny’s sleeping head, taunting him with allusions to the desires that, now living in confinement, he can no longer satisfy.

The murder mystery is to some degree a macguffin, Fuller’s excuse to get his arguably already unstable hero into the ward with its seemingly endless central corridor—the forced perspective enhanced by Fuller’s use of dwarves pacing in the middle-ground—and mold the inmates into overt surrogates for the ostensibly normal Americans outside the hospital gates. There’s the aforementioned black KKK leader, a morbidly obese man who believes he’s an opera star, a communist turned southern Civil War nut, a nuclear physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project but has regressed into infantile doodling, and a dude who thinks he’s pregnant. EST, nymphos and hallucinations come into play. Fuller piles on hysteria with a paint roller—no one could actually believe this to be an accurate representation of the mentally ill—yet there’s a precision to the neuroses that aspires to some vivid, outrageous parable. One of the movie’s most stirring effects is its peculiar use of sound, especially Johnny’s voice-over, which seems to be coming from a half-busted speaker phone on the other end of a drain pipe. Or maybe it’s just coming from the other end of that long, abysmal corridor from which it seems no one fully returns.

The Naked Kiss opens with that arresting sequence noted above, the one with the bald-headed hooker. Her name is Kelly (Towers again, in an utterly fearless performance). We quickly discover that she’s got a maternal side to her, a soft spot for crippled kids especially, that she’s an autodidact with a thing for Beethoven and Byron, that’s she’s capable of changing her life completely if they’d let her, and that she’s also got one wicked violent streak. Two years after breaking ties with her chiseling pimp, Kelly's grown her golden locks back and finds herself in a small town, where she immediately has a date with a local cop named Griff (Anthony Eisley) who tells her to keep her tricks on the other side of the river, where a madam named Candy keeps a stable of delectable “bonbons.” Kelly opts for retirement from prostitution instead and finds work at a hospital for sick kids. She discovers a hidden talent for inspiring joi de vivre in the youngins through dress-up games and elaborately arranged musical performances, which culminate in Fuller’s most brilliantly shameless sequence, in which Kelly and the flamboyantly untrained tykes share vocal duties on a melancholy little ditty translated from the French, entitled ‘Mommy dear…’

Kelly also wins the heart of Grant (Michael Dante), the ascot-wearing scion of the town’s founder, a wealthy bachelor who uncannily intuits Kelly’s dreams of self-betterment. The relationship irks Griff, Grant’s best friend, who begins a campaign to drive Kelly out of town. But complications I can’t bear to spoil here arise and Kelly’s past is exposed in tandem with the perverse underbelly of the town itself. Fuller feasts on the hypocrisy of it all, though his relish never interferes with his bracing narrative economy. The Naked Kiss is a scathing take on the “woman’s picture”, like Douglas Sirk with all the nerves exposed, complicated in its vulgarity and the intensity of its affection for its flawed heroine. Deliciously over the top, it’s perfect in it way, and might be seen as the last fully realized work Fuller would make, capping a period where the writer/director/producer seemed permanently on fire. He’d made 17 movies in 15 years. In the next 33 he’d make only five more.

That old-time religion, spectral, beautiful, spooky, everlasting: The Night of the Hunter

On the knuckles of one hand is the word LOVE, on the other, HATE, and let’s just say the former’s there mostly for show. Preacher Harry Powell (Robert Mitchum), a charismatic psychopath, likes to employ these stark tattoos to recount an inane little religious parable about the war between our better and lesser selves, the whole thing wrapping up in a triumphant wrestling hold and a slack facial expression that presumes his listeners rapture. There’s a scene where a boy tells his sister a bedtime story, and another where an old woman narrates the discovery of the baby Moses for a gaggle of children. People sing each other songs and tell each other tales throughout The Night of the Hunter (1955), which is itself balanced on the frontier of rural noir and horrific fairy tale, though we might well just call it Southern Gothic. The only movie ever directed by the great actor Charles Laughton and one of only two ever written by the great critic James Agee, this resides in its own category, a peculiar, and tremendously beautiful work that has a nagging tendency to stick in the minds of all who see it. It’s available now on DVD and Blu-ray from the Criterion Collection.

John (Billy Chaplin) and Pearl (Sally Jane Bruce) watch as the cops come for Ben (Peter Graves), their father, soon after sentenced to death for robbery and murder. Ben spends his last days sharing a cell with Harry Powell, and after Ben’s execution Harry’s left haunted by the question as to where Ben hid the stolen cash. Upon release, Harry finds, weds, and ultimately disposes of Ben’s all-too naïve widow Willa, played, with a little too much theatre, by Shelley Winters, in a role that very much anticipates her unlucky widow in Lolita (62). “My body’s just a-quivering with cleanliness,” she exclaims at one point. She longs for new baptism and in some macabre sense finds it at the bottom of the same river where Ben was said to have installed his treasure. The image of Willa below the water’s surface, seated behind the wheel of a Model T, her hair flowing behind her in chorus with the weeds, a spectral tableau of death photographed by Stanley Cortez.

That image is more haunting for the absence of underscoring, its near-silence finally broken only by Harry singing ‘Leaning on the Everlasting Arms’ unaccompanied, the same song he’ll later sing in a wonderfully unlikely duet with Lillian Gish’s tough, shotgun-wielding foster mother and fierce child protectress while he encircles her house in the dead of night. The resistance to over-cook such moments with obviously portentous music or framing is emblematic of Night of the Hunter’s exquisite elegance. There’s a scene where Pearl makes paper dolls with some of the secreted bills and a handful of them are blown by a night breeze right past Harry’s feet without his noticing. Laughton knew when he’d cast his spell. You’ll say it’s a shame that Laughton never directed again, yet when someone does it so perfectly once perhaps that’s enough.

Mitchum, usually the essence of cool anyway, likewise never winks at us, largely keeping his focus singular and Satanic, only to suddenly transform into an animalistic fiend, almost cartoon-like, in two key moments. His Harry is a very American sort of false Messiah, a chastising, sexually repressed misogynist convinced he holds private conference with God, with whom he’s worked out his own personal moral order. This arrangement grants him complete license in pursuit of his goal, and so he follows those kids relentlessly as they make their way slowly down-river on a skiff, overlooked by turtle, owl, toad, fox, sheep and rabbits, storybook emissaries. Harry’s in no hurry. I’m not even sure he really wants the money. He’s convinced of his right to some strange and bloody destiny and follows it without pause for remorse, ambling along by horse or by car, taking what he needs, exterminating whatever blocks his path on his way to glory—and right into the highest niches of cinema history.

Secret doors, captive beasts, pulsating heads: Universal Horror Classic Movie Archive

Universal Horror Classic Movie Archive collects five of the studio’s genre pieces spanning the years 1941-43. It’s an interesting transitional period if you consider that Universal’s golden years of monster movies climaxed a decade earlier—Dracula, Frankenstein, The Invisible Man and Bride of Frankenstein all debuted between 1931 and 1935—while what would arguably be the most distinctive horror films of the new decade were emerging from a B-unit at RKO helmed by producer Val Lewton, whose approach to the genre—subtle, neurotic, contemporary, rife with ambiguity, akin to noir—was essentially a complete reversal of the Universal model. The title of this box set is as misleading as it is awkward. There are no classics here, but most are at least pretty fun, while some are genuinely interesting, inventive and pleasingly strange.

The Black Cat (1941) and Horror Island (41) are both pretty slight whodunits in which characters assemble in a single location housing an unidentified killer motivated by some looming treasure. Both are big on broad comedy, the former enlisting an aging Lou Costello type, the latter a lusty sailor with a wooden leg who resembles a rather discreet drag queen. Concerning a family eagerly awaiting the death of its ancient, very wealthy matriarch, The Black Cat claims to be “suggested by” Edgar Allen Poe, though I can only imagine he would have suggested aborting production. However, the film’s atmosphere, with its smoky moonlight outlining a dense garden of trees, benefits tremendously from the work of cinematographer Stanley Cortez, who would go on to shoot The Magnificent Ambersons (42), The Night of the Hunter (55) and The Naked Kiss (64).


Man Made Monster (41), directed by George Waggner, who would also direct The Wolf Man that same year, is more interesting. Like The Wolf Man, it features Lon Chaney Jr. as a protagonist who’s at once victim and monster. You could say the film is secretly about the curse of survival, and traces of its premise can be found in Unbreakable (2000). A bus is hurled into a high power line. Everyone dies—save Chaney’s Dan McCormick, a sideshow performer who does tricks with electricity. Rather than feel wracked with guilt, Dan walks away from the accident cheerful as ever. A sadistic genius electro-biologist lures Dan into his laboratory, intrigued by Dan’s apparent immunity to electricity. He starts pumping Dan with larger and larger doses of electricity until Dan develops a dependency—there’s a pretty chilling addiction subtext here—and finally transforms into an automaton whose flesh pulsates with white heat. Supporting characters tend toward the bland, but there are beguiling montages involving note-taking and lab work, a curious current of mistrust toward psychiatry, and above all a tragic, soulful yet totally weird performance from Chaney. We feel bad for him, but do we ever really know what’s going on inside this guy?

On the surface Night Monster (42) seems of the same lineage as The Black Cat and Horror Island, replete with an old dark house, abundant secret passages and Bela Lugosi as a servant. Yet this is a creepier, more sinister, more absorbing, set in some swampy Southern town where the nights are draped in fog and local authorities don’t sweat much over the series of strangulation killings occurring near the mansion of a reclusive, quadriplegic millionaire who surrounds himself with his mentally ill sister, Lugosi’s butler, some mystic in a turban, and a chauffer who doubles as a salivating rapist. A trio of doctors converge at the millionaire’s house with their hands out for donations but instead find they’re treated to demonstrations of how matter can be altered by telekinetically adjusting its vibrations. They’re also here to pay penance for their collective failure to save the millionaire from his present condition. I loved the expressionistic fog excess, there’s a really good-looking lady shrink, a haunting night walk sequence where a spunky young woman is sadly killed, and Lugosi is forced to act normal in certain scenes, reminding you what an interesting actor he could be when not always hamming it up.

A sort of girly cousin to Fox’s Dr. Renault’s Secret (42), the puzzlingly titled Captive Wild Woman (43) was directed by Edward Dmytryk, who’d soon be helming some essential noirs, such as Murder My Sweet (44) and Crossfire (47). It features two prominent male figures, one ostensibly heroic, the other the obvious villain, aligned by their compulsion to throw wild animals into unnatural situations and tame these animals until they do their bidding. The first man is a circus performer, the second a mad scientist obsessed with “racial improvement” who inserts human glands into a gorilla, the result being the beautiful and bizarre Acquanetta, “the Venezuelan Volcano.” (The actress was actually from Wyoming.) Sounds like a successful experiment in forcing the evolution of beasts into hot babes, but of course confusion and disaster await. The wildly improbably story is quite fascinating, the mise en scène an elegant mélange of slow-motion, creeping traveling shots and sudden close-ups, and the scenes in which the circus guy tangles with real tigers and lions are more genuinely nerve-wracking than anything else in the entire box set. See it. And be nice to animals.