Raw sensationalism on a shoe-string: Shock Corridor and The Naked Kiss on DVD and BD

For those who invest their hours in the careful examination of cinematic artfulness, Sam Fuller’s best movies have a way of grabbing your presumptions by the throat, throwing them out the window, kicking them down the street, and setting fire to them just before they get run over by a truck. Fuller was a master of raw, unbridled sensationalism. His method of social critique was to lunge at a sensitive subject before dragging it half-conscious into the hot-lit arena. His work prompts us not to forgo the appreciation of cinematic elegance but to redefine it. A black mental patient convinces himself he’s a white supremacist and leads a posse of fellow inmates howling down a corridor to exact a mock-lynching, or a bald-headed prostitute beats her drunken pimp to the floor with a spike-heeled shoe, and we’re hurtled into a territory where tenderness is the progeny of audacity, where emotional precision emerges from melodrama, and where poetry rises out of action like smoke signals. “If anything irritates anyone,” Fuller once declared, “that makes me happy.”

Criterion’s new editions of Shock Corridor (1963) and The Naked Kiss (64) form a sort diptych portrait of Fuller’s transition from a career forged partly within the studios to one of arduous independence. Low-budget, sparely furnished, continuity-negligent and starkly illuminated—with photography from the great Stanley Cortez, who shot The Magnificent Ambersons (42) and The Night of the Hunter (55)—these movies prowled the greasy peripheries of American life for tales of murder and prostitution, corrupt public services and pedophilia, incest and repressed rage. The discs feature numerous terrific supplements, including an episode of The South Bank Show that finds its featured guest Fuller in top-form, but their most inspired elements are the illustrations that adorn their packaging and screen menus, courtesy of Daniel Clowes, author of the graphic novels Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron (93), Ghost World (97), and David Boring (00). Enveloping these movies in Clowes’ art enables us to better appreciate the graphically dynamic, sophisticated comic book quality of Fuller’s work.

Shock Corridor opens and closes with an epigram from Euripides that implicitly instructs us to regard what unfolds here as myth rather than mere realism or social commentary. It’s about an ambitious reporter named Johnny Barrett (Peter Breck) who pretends to have sexually assaulted his sister so as to gain admission to a mental hospital where a patient was murdered by a still-unidentified assailant. The woman reluctantly posing as the victimized sibling is actually Johnny’s girlfriend Cathy (Constance Towers), an unhappy burlesque dancer whose nightly act is captured in an extended long shot that renders Cathy puny and isolated, her choreography far more awkward and tawdry than would a conventional montage of close-ups and medium shots. In one of the movie’s masterstrokes, Fuller then revisits the burlesque act during Johnny’s institutionalized nightmares, in which a miniature ghost version of Cathy dances scantily-clad around Johnny’s sleeping head, taunting him with allusions to the desires that, now living in confinement, he can no longer satisfy.

The murder mystery is to some degree a macguffin, Fuller’s excuse to get his arguably already unstable hero into the ward with its seemingly endless central corridor—the forced perspective enhanced by Fuller’s use of dwarves pacing in the middle-ground—and mold the inmates into overt surrogates for the ostensibly normal Americans outside the hospital gates. There’s the aforementioned black KKK leader, a morbidly obese man who believes he’s an opera star, a communist turned southern Civil War nut, a nuclear physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project but has regressed into infantile doodling, and a dude who thinks he’s pregnant. EST, nymphos and hallucinations come into play. Fuller piles on hysteria with a paint roller—no one could actually believe this to be an accurate representation of the mentally ill—yet there’s a precision to the neuroses that aspires to some vivid, outrageous parable. One of the movie’s most stirring effects is its peculiar use of sound, especially Johnny’s voice-over, which seems to be coming from a half-busted speaker phone on the other end of a drain pipe. Or maybe it’s just coming from the other end of that long, abysmal corridor from which it seems no one fully returns.

The Naked Kiss opens with that arresting sequence noted above, the one with the bald-headed hooker. Her name is Kelly (Towers again, in an utterly fearless performance). We quickly discover that she’s got a maternal side to her, a soft spot for crippled kids especially, that she’s an autodidact with a thing for Beethoven and Byron, that’s she’s capable of changing her life completely if they’d let her, and that she’s also got one wicked violent streak. Two years after breaking ties with her chiseling pimp, Kelly's grown her golden locks back and finds herself in a small town, where she immediately has a date with a local cop named Griff (Anthony Eisley) who tells her to keep her tricks on the other side of the river, where a madam named Candy keeps a stable of delectable “bonbons.” Kelly opts for retirement from prostitution instead and finds work at a hospital for sick kids. She discovers a hidden talent for inspiring joi de vivre in the youngins through dress-up games and elaborately arranged musical performances, which culminate in Fuller’s most brilliantly shameless sequence, in which Kelly and the flamboyantly untrained tykes share vocal duties on a melancholy little ditty translated from the French, entitled ‘Mommy dear…’

Kelly also wins the heart of Grant (Michael Dante), the ascot-wearing scion of the town’s founder, a wealthy bachelor who uncannily intuits Kelly’s dreams of self-betterment. The relationship irks Griff, Grant’s best friend, who begins a campaign to drive Kelly out of town. But complications I can’t bear to spoil here arise and Kelly’s past is exposed in tandem with the perverse underbelly of the town itself. Fuller feasts on the hypocrisy of it all, though his relish never interferes with his bracing narrative economy. The Naked Kiss is a scathing take on the “woman’s picture”, like Douglas Sirk with all the nerves exposed, complicated in its vulgarity and the intensity of its affection for its flawed heroine. Deliciously over the top, it’s perfect in it way, and might be seen as the last fully realized work Fuller would make, capping a period where the writer/director/producer seemed permanently on fire. He’d made 17 movies in 15 years. In the next 33 he’d make only five more.

Animals, criminals, labyrinths of desire: three by Shohei Imamura

Sometimes it seems it’s the sheer unruliness that makes it so enduring, this still-underappreciated oeuvre with its gleefully grubby chaos and quasi-anthropological fixation on a postwar Japan inundated with foreigners and overrun by undesirable elements, a mélange that so audaciously breaks away from the officially sanctioned decorum and exquisite classicism exemplified by the films of the revered Yasujiro Ozu. But Shohei Imamura (1926-2006) apprenticed under Ozu, working up through the system as was demanded back then. So while his cinema reads as fiercely antithetical to the Ozu model, it’s equally informed by its discipline and moral query. Imamura was indeed a rebel in the Japanese cinema, an iconoclast and genuine mischief-maker, a middle-class kid obsessed with perversion, “the lower depths,” and basic instincts. But his rebellion had a cause and one hell of a technique. We can see it ripen in the breakthrough films collected in Criterion’s new Pigs, Pimps & Prostitutes: 3 Films by Shohei Imamura.

Set in the port town of Yokosuka, the wildly entertaining Pigs and Battleships (61) is crowded with US troops looking for diversion and locals doling it out, their unease with American vulgarity offset by envy. The title aligns Americans with brute machinery, the Japanese with swine, but comparing people to animals in Imamura should never be reduced to derision. In this cruel world where puppies are drowned, where heads get smashed through windows and dunked in gasoline, where sharing of a can of pineapple rings is the best a girl can expect from her boyfriend in the immediate aftermath of her abortion, regarding human behaviour as animalistic feels somehow affectionate.

Haruko (Jitsuko Yoshimura) works in a bar. Her goofball boyfriend Kinta (Hiroyuki Nagato) joins an extortion gang starting a pig farm. Much of what drives Pigs and Battleships is Haruko’s gradual acceptance of the lack of prospects in her current situation. It’s her escape that lends the story its battered optimism. Yet Kinta also has his journey of self-discovery. “Advised” to take a rap on behalf of a superior, he instead takes a stand in a magnificent climax where men are swallowed up in a sea of swine and a hail of bullets. In collaboration with cinematographer Shinsaku Himeda, Imamura captures the mounting absurdity in captivating camerawork that echoes the jazzy dynamicism of Sam Fuller, trailing hungrily after the action as it careens away.

Haruko became a prototype for Imamura’s heroines, tough, take-no-shit women who typically outfox and outlive the insecure men who attempt to govern them. Tomé (Sachiko Hidari), heroine of The Insect Woman (63), is remarkable not only for her endurance but her adaptability. Raised in a nest of incest and squalor, she survives alternately as a factory worker, labour organizer and prostitute, and the massive economic and ideological shifts undergone by Japan over the course of Tomé’s life are subtly reflected in the lessons she learns through experience.

The film’s original title translates as Japanese Entomology, and this may bring us closer to the heart of Imamura’s perspective. As embodied by Tomé, a people known for their traditionalism are shown as perfectly changeable when faced with issues of survival. Like the insect struggling to traverse a hillside in the film’s opening moments, the final image of Tomé trudging up a muddy country road is a portrait of dogged vitality. Imamura’s camerawork further emphasizes this sense of portraiture through the unpredictable use of freeze-frames, halting scenes not for aesthetic so much as studious pleasure. He lingers on fragments of action, intrudes on the continuity of spectacle. Perhaps it’s also a way of relieving pressure. Just as her father relieves the ache in the nursing Tomé’s under-milked breasts through his infantile suckling, so Imamura eases back and break the image apart when the narrative becomes too weighty.

Intentions of Murder (64), arguably the masterpiece in this superlative trio, appropriates several of its predecessor’s themes and hones them into something less carnally comical but more focused. Sadako (Masumi Harakawa, stunning) is a plump, uncultivated maid who becomes a common-law housewife after her employer impregnates her. Imamura puts Sadako through some harrowing but transformative experiences, arriving at a very strange yet satisfying form of catharsis. She’s assaulted in her home by a bumbling thief. She fends him off impressively, and the fight in her seems to arouse the thief. Rather than commit a straightforward rape however, the thief loosens Sadako’s bonds and attempts to generate something like consent. Their coupling is fraught with ambiguity to say the least. No one films a sex scene quite like Imamura. His bodies seem always to be feverishly clenched by repression and urge.

In keeping with cultural codes, sex with the thief leaves Sadako initially planning suicide before desperately craving food. Hunger trumps tradition. Eventually, despite being stalked by the now romantically obsessed thief—actually a middling nightclub drummer with a fatal heart condition—despite the abuse of her asshole husband—an asthmatic librarian—Sadako will develop a new inner fortitude. And the final section of the film especially, perhaps prompted by a haunting, vertiginous dream sequence, finds Imamura exploring newly expressionistic terrain, a cinematic poetry built upon snow, trains, distance and dread. It’ll leave you wondering where he’ll go next. The answer can be found in The Pornographers (66), also available from Criterion, which rewards expectations generously.

Sweat, blood and explosions: Most masculine movies from Fuller and Daves discovered on DVD

I came to the so-called masculine movie genres not as a kid, which I guess is normally the case, but as an adult movie addict, mainly out of interest in the work of certain stars and directors who churned them out during the studio era. Maybe this explains the sort of child-like glee I now feel when DVD distributors lure a few more such titles out of the vaults. From my current vantage point, I can survey the films for their glints of complexity, their often impressive craftsmanship, but I also retain a sort of delayed, innocent awe for their particular brand of high adventure, rugged romance and male camaraderie.

Hell and High Water (1954) is  part of Fox’s ongoing DVD revival of the films of Sam Fuller, the American director whose wildly dynamic camera style and bold-faced studies of desperation and moral murk have helped to maintain his cult status. In keeping with Fuller’s yanked-from-the-headlines, eruptive style, Hell and High Water actually opens with an atomic detonation, the gaudy red credits splashed across a towering Technicolor mushroom cloud. “This is the story of that explosion,” the voiceover explains.

“That explosion” was actually produced in the Arctic in 1953 by then-unknown authors. Thus Hell and High Water is about an independent international group of scientists and politicos who arrange for a decorated WWII submarine captain (Richard Widmark) to lead a crew comprised of one male scientist, one female scientist (Bella Darvi) and a whole bunch of sweaty, shirtless, slobbering, chauvinist goofballs on a secret mission to find out who is behind the bomb, how they got it, and what their no-doubt devious plans are. But the film’s real highlights come from the details and bravura miniature set pieces: from sexual harassment to manual mutilation, from a China-centric rendition of “Don’t Fence Me In” to a brutal casualty suffered while interrogating a Chinese prisoner, Hell and High Water is well endowed in character, texture and audacity.

Widmark’s character this time out isn’t in keeping with the manic, hysterical losers he made his mark with in Kiss of Death (47) or Night and the City (50), but he’s cagey, conflicted and terrifically compelling in the film’s major turning points. The only significant supplement on the Hell and High Water disc is a typically hokey A&E Biography of Widmark, which shamelessly exploits his brother’s illness and death for cheap drama, but is fascinating nonetheless. Widmark is commonly known for being as clean-cut off-screen as he was deviant on, but it’s most curious to note that while still working as a schoolteacher in the Midwest, he took his summer holidays in Nazi Germany, trying to gather material for a documentary exposé on Hitler Youth camps.


I developed an admiration for the relatively forgotten director Delmer Daves after seeing Dark Passage (47), a brilliantly bizarre noir based on a David Goodis novel, full of hallucinatory subjective camerawork and featuring a killer cast of Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Agnes Moorhead and Tom D’Andrea. I then discovered Daves’s enormously appealing 3:10 to Yuma (57), based on an Elmore Leonard western and featuring a very seductive Glenn Ford as the baddie. I can’t reasonably expect to find anything else in Daves’s filmography to match this pair, but I’m sufficiently motivated to check out his other films.

Broken Arrow (50), however, is neither another crown jewel nor a total disappointment. Set in 1870, it’s one of the very first westerns to attempt to come to terms with the genre’s racist tendencies, a self-consciously liberal-minded picture in which a gold-hunting loner (James Stewart) is drawn out of his neutrality in the hostilities between American expansionists and Cochise’s Apaches after having his life saved by an Apache teen—while still bearing witness to Apache torture methods in a chilling nocturnal tableau.

The film carries a balance of respectful anthropological detail mixed with the usual awkward casting of whites in the major Apache roles. Stewart is as convincing as always playing the stubborn moral authority, and the film never succumbs to any overly whitewashed characterizations of the other side. In fact, the final shoot out between some whites and Geronimo’s renegade warriors ends quite brutally. Founded in a spirit of colonial apologetics that now feels a bit quaint, it’s very much a film of its time—but not one without a few teeth, and more than a few incredible vistas.