Shockproof

Seems like every other film I put on at random speaks to my shelved "crime road movie" idea about the well-meaning couple who commit a crime and flee from Washington state to Mexico and lose their soul along the way. Shockproof is definitely a film in this category. Or at least, it wants to be. Somewhere in there is the story of a man who falls for the wrong girl and does crazy things for her, sacrificing incrementally more and more of his principles and reputation (in other words, his identity) to be with her; and somewhere in there is the story of a girl pushed back and forth by two love-mad men, one a smalltime bad-guy and the other a smalltime good-guy, only each shove pushes her further away from any reasonable moral center. Somewhere in there is a story that asks is love bigger than the troubles of real life, or are the troubles of real life bigger than love? And the answers are almost interesting.

It's hard to say if what holds it back is the romance backbone of the story, the Douglas Sirk melodramatic tone, or the populist expectations of the era. A little research suggests that the original ending of Samuel Fuller's screenplay had Griff "violently rebelling against the system that tried to keep him and Jenny apart." Instead, here, we have Jenny realize how far through the muck she's dragged this poor guy and turn herself in, only to be rewarded by a weird and abrupt one-eighty by her antagonistic former love interest, when he decides to drop all charges, apparently rendering the apathetic cops unable to convict them of anything. (Note: Jenny didn't "drag" Griff through any muck, actually; in fact he dragged her practically kicking and screaming into virtually every mess they find themselves in. Griff Marat has got to be the most cracked, poor-judgment parole officer in the history of criminal law, but I guess love'll make you do crazy things, right?)

The story undermines itself completely before the end, and to make matters worse it seems to only have two modes: heavy-handed symbolism and overwrought, too-thematically-spot-on dialogue. My instinct is that the former is Sirk's touch and the latter Fuller's, and neither helps the story work. Basically, this isn't the very best movie ever made, but it hits on some pretty interesting themes and has, until the (anti-)climax at least, a pretty decent structure. Something just got overcooked along the way, and the result is a somewhat toothless, stale romantic fantasy.

But it's really so close to something... it really is. Oh well.

Pickup on South Street

I have really mixed feelings on this one, to be honest. I like the tone of the story and the world that's set up, and I enjoy the performances of the pickpocket Skip and Moe the snitch, but the cops and feds and commies -- and the "muffin," Candy -- barely register. It's hard to determine who the real protagonist is, which might be interesting in an espionage-laden crime noir about some accidentally stolen government microfilm, but it would necessitate all players to be as much fun to watch as only some of them are. Whenever the story cuts back to Joe and his Red conspirators, or to Captain Tiger and the authorities, the story loses all its steam instantly. Candy is interesting, but her part is undercooked -- she has no real reason to get so deeply involved in the first place, and too much of her motivation in the second half is dependent on that old movieland fall-back, Love At First Sight. Since it never feels quite logical, it never carries the weight it's meant to in the story. In fact, that Skip and Candy get each other in the end doesn't even seem to matter. On that note, I'm not sure I would've been very disappointed if Skip had been caught, or Candy killed, or hell, if the Reds had gotten away scot-free. Realizing how little I've invested in any of the players, even my favorites (though I suppose it's a shame Moe had to die), doesn't help me build a case for liking this film much.

But I have to admit, I do kind of like it. It's got that raw Fuller energy that nobody else had back then, like an indie filmmaker fifty years before the term was invented. It's not that he's making b-movies, though he obviously uses some b-movie actors and techniques, it's just that he's making movies cheaper and looser than the era was used to, and getting away with more. I do like the world set up here, and I have a feeling there's some straight lines to be drawn between the cops-and-robbers seediness of Pickup and the French New Wave films of someone like Melville or maybe Truffaut.

The film presents us with a world that's concise and sharp, with fun (probably made-up) slang like "cannon" and "muffin," where every single pickpocket working has a "signature move" and if you want to know who robbed you, you just buy a tie from the crazy lady (and the hoods don't begrudge her her snitching, seeing it rather as all part of the cops-and-robbers game). It's just that the players in this particular game aren't very exciting. And the stakes of the game (I know, I know, national security and the red scare and all that) aren't really used to any emotional end. In Shock Corridor all the American History stuff stood for deeper psychic pains in both the inmates and the world as a whole; but here the same kinds of elements feel like they exist just as an excuse for one team to distrust the other, almost as a cheapening of the politics, as if to say: reds vs yanks, it's no different than the cops and crooks in our silly action movies. I guess I see (and totally agree) with the point, but it's not a very strong one, and I'm not even positive it's intentional.

Anyway, I can't hate it, but I don't love it. Which made it an ideal choice to rewatch while I work (though the movie got a lot more attention than my work did).

Shock Corridor

When I saw Hitchcock's Spellbound, I was so frustrated with the silly, ignorant depiction of psychoanalysis and dream-analysis that I couldn't enjoy the film. Everything about Spellbound hinges on psychoanalysis working a way that is so obviously unrealistic, an unresearched explanation of an at-the-time new school of thought, and if I couldn't accept the basic premise then I couldn't accept the story built on it. I had the same trouble with Inception, which depends entirely on an artificially constructed series of rules about dreaming, only I have to admit that on second watching I was able to accept the in-story rules and enjoy the film. Perhaps I owe Spellbound another try. Salvador Dalí directed the dream sequences, after all.

The same sort of phenomenon is at work in Shock Corridor, although to be honest it doesn't so much ruin my enjoyment of the film as it does color it. Like Inception, I can say, okay, inside this story the rules work this way, and within those rules as long as we stay consistent I can enjoy the story. Like Inception and like Spellbound, the main drama and the concepts and themes that drive the story are just as valid, whether or not psychoanalysis, or dream states, or clinical insanity work in real life the way they do in the stories.

This feels like "exploitation cinema" with a conscience and a soapbox, which works better than maybe it should. (It's not my first time seeing it, but it's been a while and I only half-remembered it.) Each of the three witnesses Barrett has to interview have convenient lapses into sanity for him, but in each case the lapses teach us that their breaks from reality were the direct and singular result of primary political movements of the last ten or twenty years: the communist scare and shame of succumbing to a different ideology drove the first witness mad; racial segregation and hatred in the south did in the second; and the construction and deployment of the hydrogen bomb was the burden of the third.

It struck me as interesting that while these large-scale American problems were being exposed as ugly and messy and soul-destroying, our hero was monomaniacally obsessed with such a petty thing: the murder of another patient. But it's not that one single murder in an insane asylum outweighs the impact of all American history for Johnny Barrett: it's that his Pulitzer Prize-winning story, his own fame and glory, outweighs all the carnage and wounded souls of recent American history. Not a very flattering approach to a hero, I've got to say.

A lot could also be said (and no doubt has been said) about the particulars here. His girlfriend -- who is pretending against her will to be his sister -- is a stripper. The soldier-turned-communist-turned-pariah has reverted back to a general on the losing side of an older, equally hate-filled conflict: the U.S. Civil War -- a position which would make him a pariah by modern eyes but a hero in his own. The first black student in a desegregated college has taken on the role of his own oppressor, chasing black men and "founding" the Ku Klux Klan as a way to keep other blacks from "marrying his daughter." And the "most brilliant mind the United States," the doctor responsible for the H-bomb (this story's Oppenheimer, or Dr. Felix Hoenikker) has become an innocent child who only wants to play games. Meanwhile, of course, the reporter hellbent on solving a case and writing an award-winning story is driven insane by the conditions and environmental pressures within the asylum -- of course one of the primary themes here is that asylums do not make people better, but simply foster and incubate more madness (the doctors even say as much, plain as day, at the end).

You can smell the tragedy of the end a mile off, but Samuel Fuller and his cast make it a lot of fun getting there. This film comes after the novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (though an excerpt of his autobiography suggests that the idea for this story dates back for Fuller to at least the late 40s, when he wrote for Fritz Lang and Douglas Sirk), but it's hard to imagine that a lot of asylum-centric films like Cuckoo's Nest and 12 Monkeys weren't greatly influenced by the world and tone presented here.