Shockproof: breaking society’s shackles

With Douglas Sirk directing and Sam Fuller writing the screenplay, you’d expect that Shockproof (1949) would be an explosive film noir full of interest – and it is.

Sirk, the German exile, who became best known for a series of 1950s proto-feminist melodramas – such as Imitation of Life, All That Heaven Allows, Magnificent Obsession – and Fuller, who went on to direct memorable and idiosyncratic Westerns and film noirs in the 1950s and 1960s – Shock Corridor, The Naked Kiss, Run of the Arrow, Forty Guns – create a film of bewildering twists and turns, not so much in plotting but in character, as the protagonists are put through the mill as they try to find their best selves and overcome their pasts, their families and society. 

 

Patricia Knight plays Jenny Marsh, a convicted murderer who’s just been released from prison after five years. Her parole officer is the upright Griff Marat, played by the magnificent Cornel Wilde, devoted to his job, to the rules, to helping people get back on the straight and narrow, and to his family: his recently widowed blind mother and his younger brother, both of whom idolise him.

 

Griff is immediately attracted to the beautiful ex-killer and does all he can to make her parole a success: finding her work and somewhere to stay, and when these are insufficient, bringing her to his home, making her a carer and companion for his mother.

 

All this love, attention, compassion, rather than ‘civilising’ Jenny makes her sick, suffocates her, as she longs for Harry Wesson, the slick, flamboyant gambler, the man she loved before prison and whose life of glamour, danger and independence she wishes to rejoin. 

 

It is a stunning repudiation of bourgeois society and domesticity that shocks the viewer to the core. How could Jenny reject the pure love of the hardworking, honest, handsome, dependable Griff for the superficial fop Johnny? But she does, going so far as to run away and risk violating her parole and being sent back to jail.

 

Griff, however, refuses to give up on Jenny and rather than letting her go decides to confess his love to her and ask for her hand in marriage. It is a proposal as Jenny’s parole officer that puts Griff’s career and future prospects at risk. 

 

Jenny is moved. It’s the first time a man has wanted her for a wife. Her mind is in turmoil. What kind of life does she want? Which man truly loves her? The one who is prepared to give up his life for her or the one who allowed her to go to prison for a crime committed on his behalf? 

 

She chooses the former, to Harry’s consternation, who sets out to destroy the man who’s taken his lover from him by revealing to him she’s an unrepentant deceiver who’s taken Griff for a fool. Jenny shoots her ex-lover and so begins the second part of the film as Griff, rather than turn Jenny in, goes on the run with her.

 

The fugitive couple now engage in a gruelling cat and mouse game as they seek to avoid capture by the police and the certainty that Jenny will be sent back to prison for life for shooting Johnny. 

 

Griff and Jenny’s love is put to the test. They are short of money, the people they encounter want to betray them rather than help them, they become paranoid and argue with each other. They live in squalor, they go hungry, move constantly, do backbreaking work just to survive. All the while, the net closes in on them…

Shock Corridor: American society going mad

In Samuel Fuller’s Shock Corridor, Johnny Barrett is a brilliant journalist who feigns sexual perversion to get committed to a lunatic asylum where a murder has been committed, which he wants to solve and win the Pulitzer Prize.

Once inside the mental home, Barrett ingratiates himself with the three witnesses to the crime – an operatic uxoricide; a black Klansman; and a genius nuclear physicist who has regressed to childhood to escape the guilt over his catastrophic discoveries – and cracks the case but only at the expense of cracking up himself.

The film begins and ends with the famous quote from Euripides – ‘whom God wishes to destroy, He first makes mad’ – and Fuller seems well versed in Greek tragedy.

Johnny Barrett is like Oedipus, a man with a brilliant intellect, supremely confident of himself and his mental powers, trying to track down a murderer, to uncover the truth of a horrible crime, only to succumb to insanity and ruin.

Barrett like Oedipus fails to realise the dangers inherent in the obsessive pursuit and acquisition of knowledge; is oblivious to the limits of self-knowledge (know thyself/gnothi seauton does not mean acquire self-mastery but know the limitations of human nature); and aspires to the truth not for its own sake, or for the love of enquiry, but to subdue the truth and satisfy his ego.

Christopher Rocco and Bernard Knox say that, in the figure of Oedipus, Sophocles is satirising Periclean/imperial Athens – Oedipus tyrannos as Athens tyrannos – and warning of the perils for individuals and cities in love with power:

‘Oedipus embodies the splendor and power of Athens: his attempt to assert dominion over nature and his unquenchable drive for human mastery; his forcefulness of purpose, his impatience, decisiveness, and daring, bordering on recklessness; his intoxication with his own accomplishments, his liberation from the constraints of all traditional pieties; his restlessness, innovation, and ingenuity; his designs that are swift alike in conception and execution, all recall the “fierce creative energy, the uncompromising logic, the initiative and daring which brought Athens to the pinnacle of worldly power.”’

Not only do Oedipus’ attributes recall Athens, but they also recall America, and Fuller, too, in Shock Corridor is interested in unveiling America tyrannos and showing us a hubristic society, prone to self-destruction and insanity.