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…
