Current & Past Events
Shock Corridor Screening
Maverick auteur Samuel Fuller’s overwrought and sensational Shock Corridor (1963) has been called one of the best B-movies ever made. A self-serving newspaper reporter who impersonates an insane sex pervert has himself committed to an asylum, the site of an unsolved murder, hoping to crack the case and win a Pulitzer Prize. His witnesses inside include a black man who behaves like a white supremacist, and a white atomic scientist who now has the mind of a child. We also encounter crude media stereotypes of mental illness prevalent at that time of the film: women depicted as “nymphos”; scores of men posturing catatonically, cowering against walls, or rowing phantom boats. There is an abundance of camp – including, in an otherwise black-and-white film, some truly bizarre colour inserts. Yet Shock Corridor somehow remains a rare treat, a B-movie that actually says something – a heavy-hitting denouncement of America’s bigotry, arms race, and xenophobia as the cultural equivalents of insanity.
—Pacific Cinematheque
- date & time:
- August 27th, 2007 at 7 pm
- location:
- 6363 Stores Road Studio 2A University of British Columbia
- contact:
- [info@colourschool.org]