What's a pulp classic?
Well, Samuel Fuller's 1963 flick Shock Corridor certainly constitutes one.
This extraordinary pic came out in that key time of pre-Vietnam, post-Korean War and is one of the best examples of a cheap, sleazy, violent, surrealist melodrama with a brain.
It begins with a success hungry journalist convincing his stripper girlfriend to pretend to be his distraught sister who then commits her pretend brother to a violent mental hospital cause of his pretend incestuous advances. Does that sound pulpy? Anyway, once he's in there he's in a pot-boiler analogy of things deeply wrong with the U.S. of A.
The journo is looking to solve a murder and the three witness are in there with him. The first is a cowboy who thinks he's in the civil war. He was an ignorant farmer's son as played by some young experimental theatre actor who'll one day be Sheriff Rosco in Dukes of Hazard. He gets the line of the movie; "Everyday my parents fed me bigotry for breakfast and ignorance for supper". It's as a prisoner to the commies that he gets his first taste of political thought and naturally he goes over to the Red's side. But when he wants to come home both sides think he's a traitor and so his brain goes pl'nk.
The second is the first African-American to go to a white school, but he couldn't deal with the racist protesters and he flunked out. Now he thinks he's the founder of the Ku-Klux-Klan. The third is the inventor of the intercontinental nuke and he deals with the guilt by becoming a six year old.
The film is in black and white, but our loonies dream in other-worldly colour (bizarre home movie images of a Japanese Buddha and African natives in mud masks). Dreaming in colour will make you temporarily sane. The real world is in black and white. I think you can catch the film's drift.
This is a bold exploitationer full of striking images, like rain in the corridor of the film's title, and bizarre characters, like the fat man who keeps waking the hero up with opera then making him eat gum. But what is most wild about this picture is that in all its ultra-cheap burlesque tawdriness - which includes a room of literally man-hungry women and a hero's nightmares of a girlfriend considering the freedom to be unfaithful as shown by a miniature version of her in showgirl outfit tickling his ear with a feather boa - this is a film about the failure of the American conscience.
But no way can you just go out and say that, certainly not as yet in the early '60s. So Fuller makes the truth - well, his truth - come out of the mouths of madmen. He makes reality of the early sixties come out of the frame of a surrealist art-house picture masquerading as, while still legitimately being, a cheapo shocker for the cinematic insensitive. Now that couldn't have been easy.
Naturally, at the time, Shock Corridor was hated and reviled and considered a sicko, non-nonsensical mess. But do feel good to know that Samuel Fuller lived long enough to see his Hollywood cheapies become key contributions to American maverick cinema and for him be acknowledged as a mentor for go-it-alone filmmakers, such as Martin Scorsese, Jim Jarmush, David Lynch and Hal Hartley. He appeared as himself in Wim Wender's End of Violence (at the age of 86) and it should come as no surprise that the Europeans were onto him long before his home country decided he was a groundbreaking hero of decadent cinema with clandestine messages for the brainwashed masses.
Fuller in the 60s was wild, weird and interesting. The Naked Kiss is the other one of his films that looks at the insanity of mid-Century America. Any movie where a prostitute is the most moral character in the entire show is at the very least, interestingly iconoclastic.
Naked Kiss and Shock Corridor make a good double.