Hidden Flick: Down The Rabbit Hole
Willfully walking into a wild and wacky situation is one thing. To do so in the pursuit of some sort of lofty man-made goal, and hope to pull through with all of one’s senses intact is quite another thing entirely. What is it one is really looking for? How to get it done? Does it really matter in the end? When has one truly gone over the edge? A case by case basis, to be sure, and The Edge, as Hunter S. Thompson would have said, is in the mind of the beholder as we commence on our little journey down the rabbit hole of madness.
A murder has been committed, and there are three witnesses. Unfortunately, the crime occurred in an insane asylum, and the witnesses aren’t speaking, so the main character, a journalist in a gravely misguided pursuit of a Pulitzer Prize for solving the mystery, decides to have himself committed into the institution in this week’s Hidden Flick, a sharp, haunting, and sometimes completely bonkers film, Samuel Fuller’s 1963 cautionary tale of moral destiny and mental destitution, Shock Corridor.
Peter Breck plays Johnny Barrett, the ambitious scribe, who is so confident in his own intellect and talent that he concocts a weird back-story to get himself inside the mental hospital as a patient with a lecherous edge. His girlfriend, Cathy, a stripper with the proverbial heart of gold, played by Constance Towers, would pretend to be his sister, and complain to the authorities that her brother was molesting her, and should be committed because of his pending mental breakdown and dangerous threat to society. Barrett would simply pose as a patient, investigate the other patients and guards, eventually interview the three witnesses to the murder, solve the case, identify the murderer, write his glorious story, and win the Pulitzer Prize. Such a brilliant and easy enough idea, right?
READ ON for more on this week’s Hidden Flick – Shock Corridor…
Well, wrong as these things often go in fact and fiction. Towers isn’t being pushed easily into this little plot of murder, madness, and deception. She fears that her journalist boyfriend will eventually be tainted by his environment, go native, and become insane himself. At the beginning of the film, her overwrought pleadings to keep Barrett out of the mental hospital are supported with claims that his quest is self-serving and will eventually lead to his self-destruction, but no one thinks that other than her. Sometimes the scenes of her defiance appear a bit too prophetic and filled with foreshadowing as if the viewer is being told what is going to happen, and the director just follows through with that signpost to insanity step by step until Barrett’s mind cracks.
And that is exactly what writer, producer, and director Samuel Fuller did in this hidden classic from our pre-Beatles, pre-Easy Rider, artistic renaissance of the mid-to-late 1960s.
Ahh…the trick. Fuller has many, and he doesn’t stop at showing mild and polite crazy. No—the filmmaker goes FULL PSYCHO, and some of the scenes are chillingly realistic in their ability to conjure madness, illogical behavior, weird sexuality, and fear of the devise mentioned in the title, ‘shock treatment’ to sooth and completely tweak the mind.
Barrett gets sucked further and further down into the residue of a sane mind until he is nothing left but a shell of his former self. The Twilight Zone-like plot also features the wayward journalist learning the truth about the murder but the way he is able to handle that bit of choice news at the time that he finally finds out is symbolic of many of man’s dark pursuits over the centuries. The clichéd and fortune cookie-like questions pop up, but they ring true, nonetheless. Sure, you can have what you want, but what price are you willing to pay to gain that morsel of truth? Can you slide down the hole into another world in pursuit of the truth, and return as the same person? Is The Truth really important when it costs a man’s soul, his sanity, and the girl he uses to attain it?
- Previously on HT: Hidden Flick
- Shock Corridor: Amazon,
NetFlix
Filmed in black & white, Rumble Fish also stars Matt Dillon, Diane Lane, Diana Scarwid and Nicolas Cage, Coppola’s nephew in one of his earliest roles. However, it is the weird and twisted appearances of Rourke, Fishburne, Dennis Hopper, and Tom Waits that add nuance and texture to what could have been a forgettable cheesy endeavor. Hopper is the alcoholic father who spouts historical references and odd sound bites to his beleaguered son, played by Dillon, and Fishburne, is sort of a guardian angel to the hapless lad, as well. Waits sinks his teeth into his role as an eccentric billiards hall owner, foreshadowing his 1992 bent romp as Renfield in Coppola’s Dracula.
