El susto

At first, Shock looks like it should be assigned to the `Oneiric' Wing of forties film noir, but soon comes to occupy a niche in the Evil Psychiatry Wing instead. Anabel Shaw checks into a San Francisco Hotel awaiting her serviceman husband. Bad weather has delayed him, so, instead of curling up with a cozy mystery, she witnesses a murder from the balcony of her suite. Next morning, her husband finds her in a state of complete catatonia. A psychiatrist (Vincent Price) is summoned, who turns out to be none other than the murderer.

Checking sight angles from the balcony to his apartment across the way, Price realizes that Shaw's trancelike state no doubt stems from her seeing him take a candlestick to his older, inconvenient wife. He whisks her off to that chamber of horrors, his Private Sanitarium, to find out what she remembers. He and his accomplice/mistress Lynn Bari devise a scheme to make Shaw, and everyone else, think she's delusional – that she views everyone as a murderer. Meanwhile, however, a fluke of circumstance leads the police to reopen the case of Price's wife, whose death had been contrived to look accidental. Next, Price and Bari escalate their therapy to dangerous insulin-shock treatments....

Price glides through his role with the disdainful urbanity that was his trademark in the morning of his career; interestingly, though, the plot turns on his having some shreds of conscience, or at least professional ethics, after all. The same can't be said of Bari as the Lady Macbeth of the piece; what can be said is that there should be more of her. She hits her peak during a violent nocturnal thunderstorm, when a menacing patient slips out of his room and into Shaw's. It really does turn the sanitarium into a chamber of horrors.

While Janet Stewart (Anabel Shaw) is waiting for her husband, Paul (Frank Latimore), whom she hasn't seen in over two years (he's been at war and at one point was thought to be dead), to meet her at a hotel, she witnesses an argument and then a murder in another room. She goes into shock, and is taken to a mental hospital for treatment. Unfortunately, Richard Cross (Vincent Price), the doctor treating her, is the same man she witnessed committing murder.

Although somewhat of a potboiler and a bit short on running time per today's standards, Shock is a tightly scripted, directed and acted thriller. As usual, Price is at the top of his game here, and any Price fans who haven't seen this film yet will want to check it out. The rest of the cast is also fantastic, and Shaw particularly stands out when she's on screen (which is not as often as we might like, but given the story, a necessity). Suspense is maintained throughout the film--even in the minor scenes. There was even a fair amount of tension in the opening when Janet Stewart is first checking into the hotel.

My score is 9 out of 10. I only subtracted one point for the ending, which came too soon and a bit too abruptly for my tastes. However, given typical studio restrictions during this era, when it was mandatory that the "bad guys" get their just deserts, the ending is also admirable for its relative ambiguity. It is almost similar in style to Stanley Kubrick's lauded ending of The Killing (1956), which also tried its best to circumvent the just deserts conclusions, though Shock predates the Kubrick film by 10 years.

I've always enjoyed Vincent Price's sad expressions and gentle voice. It's full of threat and pity. He is one of a kind. His savoir faire and manners are right at the top. In this one he commits a murder he really didn't wish to and then must use some pretty extreme measures to cover his tracks and get together with his ruthless lover. The victim is an unstable young woman who has a nervous breakdown when she witnesses the murder. The doctor, one of the top in his field, is constantly pulled between evil actions and the good that is in him. He comes to realize he is wrong and that he has been led astray, but it is too late now. Viewing this in the year 2007, it is filled with some pretty questionable tactics and oversights. What they do to this girl would require a lot of documentation. The sad part isn't the aged quality of the social setting. It's that at some point it all seems to become rather dull. Once they are on to Price's character, the story just falls into a voluble anticlimax. Enjoy watching Vincent Price. Otherwise it is pretty pedestrian.

Shock (1946)

You know right away this is a little creaky, but Vincent Price is in great form, and the idea of being committed to an insane asylum when you aren't insane is enough to carry almost any hour long movie. The filming in particular gives the film a polish the actors generally do not, and the plot has some conveniences that you can only smile at. They are not inconsistencies, and people act with a high level of logic.

You might call this a film noir, because of its gloom, because of its classic (and cruel) femme fatale, and because there is murder at hand. But most important is the appearance here and there of the solider, still in uniform, just returned from the war after two years missing in action. His positively sweet good nature in the face of an utter breakdown of the world he expected to find is meant to resonate with so many in the audience on both sides of just such homecomings. It's 1946, after all, and there isn't any larger theme for the average Jane and Joe.

Totally fun. And great, undiluted suspense.

According to the Films Of Vincent Price from the Citadel Film Series, sometime in late 1945 Darryl Zanuck was on one of his budget cutting kicks and was looking to produce cheaper films. Vincent Price was offered the story of Shock and liked it and said he could get it done under 20 days with no interference. Zanuck gave him his head on this one and Price and director Alfred Werker brought it in 19 days shooting time.

Shock was also the film that Vincent Price got top billing for the first time in his career. He plays a psychiatrist who kills his wife because she won't give him a divorce to marry the sultry Lynn Bari. The problem is that young war wife Anabel Shaw who is anxiously waiting the return of a husband who was thought missing in action in the Pacific sees him through the window of her room at the hotel they're both staying at.

Shaw's got a lot of issues and she collapses and goes into Shock. It's recommended that she go to a sanitarium and husband Frank Latimore now returned takes her to a highly regarded one that is run by both Price and Bari. I don't think I have to go any further.

Shock may have been done on a dime and in a hurry, but it's well constructed and was the film that opened new vistas for Vincent Price's career. Price elicits a lot of audience sympathy being caught by mantrap Lynn Bari. As for Bari I don't think she was ever sexier or more dangerous. Stronger men than Price might have killed for her.

Definitely a must for the still strong legion of fans that Vincent Price has.