‘Shock Corridor’ and ‘The Naked Kiss’
Criterion Collection, $29.95 (each)Sam Fuller had the inside scoop on American culture. The filmmaker (and former newspaperman and pulp-fiction author) understood that, for all our country’s lofty beliefs in freedom, equality, and new beginnings, we were also an uptight bunch who frequently fell short of our ideals. Fuller’s filmmaking cuts to the heart of the contradictions that exist between our thoughts and actions. In fact, the exposure of the paradoxes and hypocrisies that govern our lives as a nation can be seen as the crux of all of Fuller’s films. At the peak of his filmmaking career in mid-20th century America, we were a people who tended to keep our moral dichotomies tucked away from public view. Fuller brought our tacit racism, mob mentality, and holier-than-thou self-image into stark contrast with the realities of American life as he saw them. And he did it with gloves off, in a punchy, dynamic manner that could be as lurid, sentimental, and sensationalistic as the tabloids on which the young reporter cut his teeth. Fuller remained a newsman to the end.
There are hardly two better films to demonstrate Fuller’s grip on America’s inherent paradoxes than 1963’s Shock Corridor and 1964’s The Naked Kiss, both of which have been newly restored and reissued in handsome packages by Criterion. In Shock Corridor, a journalist who is investigating a murder and seeking to win a Pulitzer Prize has himself committed to a mental hospital as a patient. His undercover ruse backfires when he is driven mad in the process of uncovering the truth. His hubris is his downfall. While in the hospital, the reporter finds his witnesses, each one insane as a result of trying to reconcile America’s hypocrisies. In one of the supplementary interviews included on the disc, Fuller describes the central motif of the hospital corridor as the “corridor of the United States.” That corridor is ravaged by the flood of diseased minds in the film’s final sequence during which the hallway is literally soaked in the waters of an unleashed storm.
If the end of Shock Corridor lived up to the promise of its title, the opening of Fuller’s next film, The Naked Kiss, was even more shocking. Quick and wild point-of-view shots drop us into the film as a prostitute is pummeling her pimp with her clutch purse. It is one of the most unnerving openings ever put on film. The woman moves to another town and wants to remake her life. She takes a job as a nurse’s aide at a children’s orthopedic hospital and meets the man of her dreams – a rich scion of the town’s founder and the owner of the naked kiss, the sign of a pervert. Only later does she discover he is a child molester, and with that truth, her dream of a new beginning disintegrates.
While the extras on The Naked Kiss DVD include interviews with Fuller, which offer some of the cigar-chomping flavor of the man and his manner, the Shock Corridor disc contains the 1996 film The Typewriter, the Rifle & the Movie Camera, a delicious portrait of Fuller as expressed by some of his biggest fans: Tim Robbins, Martin Scorsese, Jim Jarmusch, and Quentin Tarantino. Contemporary reflections by Constance Towers, who starred in both films, are also featured on each disc. Among other essays and highlights, the most unexpected treat is the artwork by Ghost World cartoonist Daniel Clowes. When it comes to Fuller, the unexpected is the norm.
This article appears in January 14 • 2011.
