Word: fullers
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...this were all there is to Fuller's intentions, Shock Corridor would be quite a dishonest movie. Insanity is too serious a situation to hang social criticism upon; the human realities it involves require a concern with personal experience, with the roots of neurosis and schizophrenia. At first Fuller seems to ignore those roots; his direct dialogue and shooting style seem typical of B- picture sensationalism. But the simplicity of his dramatic and visual approach does not bar a truthful and deep treatment of his subject, however much it initially seems to lack subtlety...
...FULLER'S simplicity and directness come from his belief in the closeness, indeed inseparability, of interior and exterior experience. No bodily barrier can keep the events that assail a character from affecting his mind. Fuller's heroes live in situations involving the most extreme contradictions, the strongest contrary pulls on them. They remain forceful and decisive; Fuller doesn't represent the depth of social contradictions by detailing lengthy processes of decision, by creating vacillating characters. But contradictions take their toll on his tough guys after they decide what...
This 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...
...consequence of intolerable contradictions, is thus an objective fact, not a subjective claim on sympathy. We see the nightmares that plague the reporter's imagination and equally hear the cries of demented patients around him. Objective and subjective, exterior and interior experience become a single attack on his sanity. Fuller's direct way of showing his hero's experience is not crudely simplistic. We must be able to see everything that happens; the experiences of his characters have to be open...
This openness is the chief virtue of Fuller's style. One of its most wonderful accomplishments comes during the reporter's three meetings with the three insane witnesses. Fuller simply cuts together one- shots of the two men, showing first the reporter and then the other. Unlike most directors' one- shot cutting, this is free of self/other conceptions; it does not suggest some insidious link between their personalities. One does not see himself in the other; each is unified and individual. The cutting confronts one with the other. It also puts them together in the same situation, and to that...