Shock Corridor (1963, Samuel Fuller)

Writer, director, and producer Fuller ends Shock Corridor’s main plot so quickly, it’s like he’s in a hurry to get to the epilogues. Except the epilogues are where Corridor falls flat and doesn’t have the time to get back up. As the film progresses, Fuller makes some significant achievements and builds up such an incredible momentum it seems impossible he’ll run out of speed.

Sadly, he does. Shock Corridor pulls Fuller in just too many directions and he goes with a genre standard. Or at least a genre reliable. Corridor—at the start, anyway—is a film noir. Lead Peter Breck narrates the opening in the past tense; later, he’ll narrate in the present. It doesn’t really matter; the narration’s not successful, but Fuller proves it necessary, so it’s then becomes more tolerable. There is a move Fuller misses for the narration, which is a bummer because it literally would tie the movie together.

The first thirty or so minutes is about reporter Breck trying to convince girlfriend Constance Towers to go along with his scheme to get himself committed to the state mental hospital so he can catch a murderer and win the Pulitzer Prize. He forgets to mention he’s not going to just any state mental hospital, but the one with the celebrity patients. There’s some talk about how well Breck has researched the people he needs to interview inside the hospital, but they turn out to be so famous they’d have been on a magazine cover.

Towers thinks it’s too dangerous, not to mention illegal. Not to mention gross. Breck, his boss Bill Zuckert, and Zuckert’s war buddy turned psychiatrist whistleblower Philip Ahn want Towers to pretend she and Breck are siblings and he’s been coming on to her for years. When she’s finally had enough, she’ll report him, he’ll get hauled off to the mental hospital because it’s 1963, and even though everyone acknowledges men are dangerous to women… sometimes the ladies are really asking for it.

Ew. Also, that detail should come up in the plot and doesn’t, which is a big problem with the film heading into the third act. So when Fuller’s able to right the ship, it’s magnificent. He paces it just right, leverages Breck just right—despite Brock’s sometimes omnipresent narration, he’s far better at the brooding physical stuff—and we’re almost home.

Then wipeout when Fuller dumps treating Towers like a real character. At least she’d been the de facto protagonist for the first act, some of the second. Doing right by her would’ve made up for her always getting the shit end of the stick in Corridor. When she balks at going through with the plan, Breck reminds her she works in a strip club, and so she can’t talk. We then see Towers’s performance, which is a torch singer nightclub number, while she strips off pieces of her skimpy outfit and undulates absurdly. Once hospitalized, Towers in the skimpy outfit will become the angel (and devil) on his shoulder, superimposed, imagined, objectified. Meanwhile, the real Towers is trying to convince newspaper editor Zuckert to pull Breck out, especially after his doctor—an unfortunately middling John Matthews—calls Towers to interview her about her and Breck’s fake family relationship.

All while Towers is going to visit Breck, and they paw each other.

It’s a mess.

But it’s near perfection when Fuller gets going with the procedural—well into the second act. Fuller hammers in big ideas, does fantastic callbacks, and all while basically presenting a jingoistic patriarchal worldview with some very problematic beliefs about mental health. Because Shock Corridor isn’t about Breck’s Pulitzer dreams or Towers’s skimpy outfits (though it is, obviously, it very much is about her skimpy outfits; Fuller worked hard to make up reasons for her to be in them). Anyway. It’s about these three patients and how they’ve been experiencing modern life.

First is James Best. He’s the only one we meet in the first act. The other two actors were busy when they were shooting those crowd shots and what not. Best initially presents as a Southerner who can’t get over the Civil War (shocker), but then it turns out he’s a Korean War vet who defected to the Soviets. See, his parents had raised him to be a racist Southern shit, but then something happened in the war, and he realized it was bullshit and he was being patriotic wrong, so he became a defector. And a worldwide celebrity.

Until he meets Lee Marvin from The Big Red One. Kind of seriously. There’s not not a Sam Fuller connected universe.

Best’s low okay. Until Hari Rhodes shows up, Corridor’s acting peaks aren’t particularly considerable, so low okay isn’t bad. It also gives Breck one of his first good brooding scenes when he’s got to listen but not narrate. Since we get so little about Breck’s state of mind—the question from scene one is will Breck go insane after being institutionalized—scenes where he’s got to reflect are great. And too rare, especially since he’s got a tedious “cat got your tongue” subplot in the third act to delay things for dramatic purposes.

But even with Best just being better than expected, the content’s unexpected. Shock Corridor spends the first act trying to be lurid without being too lewd. The second act is about white racists coming to terms with imperialism (sort of), followed by a Black man (Rhodes) driven insane due to the pressure of being the only Black student at a hostile Southern university, then a nuclear physicist who knows all the times we’ve averted nuclear destruction.

Gene Evans plays the physicist and ends up being Corridor’s biggest successful swing, which is something because the way Rhodes’s mental illness presents is he thinks he’s a white Klan member who wants to lynch Black people. The staff at the integrated hospital know Rhodes is a threat to the other patients but only acknowledge it after Rhodes has attacked someone. It’s a big logic hole.

Rhodes is also absolutely spellbindingly phenomenal. Even when Fuller’s script sends him a particular curveball. Usually, within a couple of lines, Rhodes has made the outlier seem foundational to his character. He consumes it. Rhodes raises Corridor to another level. With this performance in this part, it’s clear Fuller’s more ambitious.

And he makes the Evans thing work.

And action finale.

He totally fumbles the finish. The last story to tell would be Towers’s. And then Fuller takes then that acknowledgment away while leaving another thread visibly untied.

But Corridor’s often a glorious success.

Rhodes is the hands-down best, followed by Evans, then Towers. Zuckert’s good but barely in it. Larry Tucker’s great as another patient.

Great black and white photography from Stanley Cortez throughout. Jerome Thoms’s editing is less consistent, usually thanks to Fuller’s lack of coverage. It gets really good for much of the second act, then also takes a hit for the conclusion.

Shock Corridor’s outstanding. Disappointing as all hell but outstanding.

The Naked Kiss (1964, Samuel Fuller)

The Naked Kiss is an exceptional motion picture. However, it’s never not without its problems: it’s an astoundingly classy exploitation picture about an ex-prostitute (Constance Towers) who tries going straight, only to discover the other side of the tracks just hides their secrets in different places.

The film will also explore the lack of honor (and humanity) among thieves and just how low cops will go, all while reinforcing the cops and “moral” society as worthy and everyone else as lost. Since Kiss is a character study of Towers, one could say writer, producer, and director Fuller’s message is believe women… except it turns out most women lie. Fuller’s not subtle about the message—Towers gets at least two monologues about it, while copper Anthony Eisley gets one—though I suppose the film does technically pass the Bechdel Test. Albeit due to censoring the language.

Other side of the tracks town madam Virginia Grey has “bonbon girls,” which also gives Fuller a couple opportunities to clarify in dialogue they’re not really talking about bonbons. Once the film hits the final third—Kiss is almost equally split into thirds. The first third is about Towers arriving in a small city and becoming a nurse’s aide at the local children’s hospital. The second third is about Towers’s romance with town hero Michael Dante, which is complicated by Towers’s general past as well as her single trick in town—with copper Eisley (the film’s hero who tests out all the traveling sex workers before setting them up at Grey’s, where he visits them for bonbons, presumably). The final third is Towers in trouble, learning just because Dante and the town accepted her, they might not have done it for the right reasons.

Of course, the film opens two years before the main action, with Towers beating the crap out of her pimp (a profoundly smarmy Monte Mansfield) before revealing she’s been wearing a wig and is shaved bald. The opening titles are set over Towers calmly getting her makeup on while Mansfield wallows on the floor. Kiss is never quite as in-your-face exploitation again, but Fuller never lets the audience forget where the film started.

Fuller breaks the story into vignettes, separated by fades out, which lets him establish Towers’s new persona in town offscreen. Eisley’s initially convinced Towers is doing it as some kind of weird gag—how could a sex worker want to work with kids with terrible injuries and diseases, even though everyone at the hospital says she’s a godsend. They’re all a bunch of ladies, too; they don’t know things like Eisley. Eisley’s worlds colliding changes the direction of the film in the third act, and even though it is offscreen, too, it’s clearly momentous.

Eisley’s okay. He’s a little flat, which helps since his character’s despicable, but once it’s clear he’s fallen for Towers, there’s a nice bit of depth to his actions. Especially once he’s de facto competing with Dante, who not only saved Eisley’s life in Korea but is also a millionaire who can promise Towers the world.

Kiss is rather low budget, so the world is just film strips and stylized daydream sequences. Until the second half, when Fuller can’t stop beating the drum on how Towers is only worthwhile because she got out of the bad life and everyone else there is too vile or dumb to save, it really seems like Kiss’s low-budget is going to be its Achilles Heel. While Eisley’s just a little flat, it clearly could’ve been a bigger name. Towers, too—though she’s phenomenal, so you don’t really want to see anyone else there. But then there’s Dante. Fuller’s got a lot of character actors in the supporting roles, sometimes making the thin parts more substantial, sometimes not (though usually because of the moralizing). But Dante’s usually just plain not good. He’s never terrible, but he’s sometimes bad, and he’s never any good. Watching Towers hoist their scenes up over and over looks exhausting.

Towers and Fuller are Kiss’s big achievers. He gives her a great part, problematic as it might be, and she’s outstanding. Even when she’s got to do something silly, she makes it work. It’s a superior performance. And Fuller’s direction is singular too. He uses these smash cuts to second-person shots; the camera—sometimes Towers, sometimes not—peering into someone’s face. It’s particularly devastating with the sick kids, who have an initially adorable, then infinitely macabre musical number. However, Fuller’s careful to empathize with the kids. He’s making an exploitation picture, sure, but it’s more a melodrama, after all–a didactic one at that.

Every ten to fifteen minutes—the film runs ninety—Fuller has one visually dynamic sequence or another. There’s a phenomenal synergy to the whole thing. He amps up the melodrama either through Towers’s experience of the narrative or through masterful visceral visual scenes. Great stuff.

Fuller’s crew is excellent; Stanley Cortez’s moody black and white photography is crucial, and, outside the times they reshot something but from the exact same setup, and he couldn’t cut to match, excellent editing from Jerome Thoms. Fuller, Thoms, Cortez, and composer Paul Dunlap set Kiss’s tone fast and strong while still leaving themselves room to flex throughout.

Naked Kiss has problems—heaps and heaps—but it’s one hell of a picture. And Towers is sublime.

Frasier (1993) s02e01 – Slow Tango in South Seattle

“Frasier” went out on a high point and returns for its new season strong and assured—with a new writer to the series, Martin Weiss, and James Burrows’s ably directing as always. After a quick phone call to the show from James Spader, we get to the main plot. Or we get introduced to the main plot. It’s fall 1994 and Bridges of Madison County was selling like hot cakes and “Frasier” introduces an analogue, Slow Tango in South Seattle. Roz (Peri Gilpin) is so taken with the book she’s reading it during the show, which pisses off Kelsey Grammer.

Especially after he starts reading it—in that perfect Grammer voice—and mocks it. Only then he realizes he knows the author, played by a pre-J. Peterman John O'Hurley (how weird must it be to see O’Hurley during his soap career post-Seinfeld). O’Hurley was a drinking buddy at Cheers, though not on “Cheers” itself, and stole the story of Grammer losing his virginity (to his piano teacher at age seventeen) for the novel.

We don’t find out about the story stealing until a little bit later into the episode, after it’s established Jane Leeves is reading the book too. After everyone finds out–John Mahoney and David Hyde Pierce fight with each other to get at Leeves’s copy—Grammer’s able to confront O’Hurley, who’s at the station doing a reading for a book show, only to discover he’s not getting the closure he needs.

The only way to get that closure—according to Hyde Pierce, who’s truly phenomenal in this episode, going above and beyond with his material—is to apologize to the piano teacher. After all, seventeen year-old Frasier skipped out on her—which leads to Leeves smacking him occasionally for being a shitty man and it’s hilarious.

The episode’s beautifully paced—Weiss gets in time with the family, time with the radio station (great scene for Dan Butler too), and then the resolution at the piano teacher’s house, presumably somewhere in South Seattle.

The conclusion, involving guest stars Constance Towers and Myra Carter, is absolutely hilarious and I can’t spoil.

Great dialogue, particularly for Mahoney and Gilpin. Grammer’s really good mixing the funny with the heart. Hyde Pierce’s physical performance is so good.

Very strong start for season two; also, turns out Weiss never wrote another “Frasier,” which is a shame because Slow Tango could definitely use A Thousand Seattle Streets for Niles.