Shock corridor

Peter Breck plays an ambitious reporter, Johnny Barrett, who decides to imitate an insane psychiatric patient in order to write an expose on conditions in a psychiatric asylum where a murder has recently been committed. He finds himself losing the grip on his own sanity when he confronts his fellow inmates who all exhibit paranoiac and delusional fantasies. Before long Johnny is no more sane than any of the other men inside. Samuel Fuller’s intense thriller is a searing and truly frightening dissection of American social malaise. Johnny’s fellow inmates all exhibit schizophrenic and psychotic behaviour that is reflective of the social divisions in their contemporary culture. A black man, so psychically disfigured by racism, believes himself to be a white man in the Ku Klux Klan; a man thinks he is a Civil War General because he can not deal with the stigma of being branded a “Commie”. Within the limitations of a B-movie budget, Fuller has created one of the finest and most caustic metaphors for the damage inflicted on the national psyche by the Cold War and the orgy of witch-hunts initiated by the McCarthy-era blacklist.