Word: plot
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Dates: during 1970-1970
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...Bates and Redgrave-and we don't get their characters either. Instead, Georgy gives us two actors, Dilys Watling and John Castle, who dress like their film antecedents, use some of their prototypes' mannerisms, and proceed to walk through a clumsy recreation of the film's slight plot...
...doesn't get better. Jos is established by window-entrances, feet-shuffling and puppy-dog looks. When he suddenly-very suddenly-falls in love with Georgy it means nothing to the audience on anything more than a plot level. And when he just as suddenly leaves her in the second act, it means nothing more to the audience than that it is almost time to go home...
...probably the greatest social critic among America's film-makers. "Most people say [social contradictions] should be left to the newspapers. But I say, on the contrary, that it is necessary to give them a dramatic form." For Fuller 'giving them a dramatic form' means more than inventing a plot that sets out right and wrong and a hero who battles for the good. None of his characters are aristocrats standing above society. Vulnerable without being weak or sentimental, they are beaten when they try to achieve their goals by ignoring some condition of social reality...
Various interpretations of this strange plot suggest themselves. One stresses retribution both moralistic and Freudian. The hero entered the asylum to exploit its patients, to use them as sources of information rather than as humans. The plot comes full circle, making him mad through the ravings of those he tried to use. Its symmetry is expressed in a typically explicit line of Fuller dialogue: "What an irony- an insane mute winning the Pulitzer Prize...
...takes place more in a realistic than a moral context. Fuller never says Merrill, or the reporter, is wrong. The Marauders do take their objective; Shock Corridor is "the magic highway to the Pulitzer Prize." Not having enlisted much audience sympathy for his hero, Fuller does not reverse the plot against him at the end. Instead he follows him through a world constantly informed by the duality that drives...