As Disney quietly disappears huge swathes of film history into its vaults, I'm going to spend 2020 celebrating Twentieth Century Fox and the Fox Film Corporation's films, what one might call their output if only someone were putting it out.
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As the great studios declined like mammoths sinking into tar pits, the films they produced started bifurcating: there were the stodgy, prestige pictures, like Cleopatra (1963) (which nearly sank Fox into the bitumen altogether), and there were trashy low-budget affairs farmed out to bottom-feeding indie producers, the sixties equivalent of the B pictures of yore. These were often more enjoyable than the respectable productions, even when they really were trash.
Lauren Bacall counted Shock Treatment (1964) as the worst film of her career (up to that point, anyway), and apart from her tendency to underrate Written on the Wind (1956), she had pretty sound judgement.
Director Denis Sanders was among the first film school graduates to make films for the majors: an early clue to the new direction. He'd won the Oscar for Best Short Subject for 1954 grad film, A Time out of War, and co-wrote Raoul Walsh's film of The Naked and the Dead (1958). In retrospect, it seems a mostly downhill career, bottoming out in Invasion of the Bee Girls in 1973, which has its fans, among them Jim Jarmusch, but which always struck me as too nastily misogynistic to work as innocent camp. Still, he made some quality episodic TV and documentaries such as The American West of John Ford (1971), which is an admirable piece.
Roddy McDowall chops off an old lady's head with garden shears ninety seconds into Shock Treatment, which is what is known as setting the scene. Psycho (1960) has burst upon us, and various imitators are rushing to catch up. No shame in that. William Castle, whose cheap gimmick thrillers (e.g. Macabre, 1958) had inspired Hitchcock's more celebrated effort, was among the imitators (e.g. with Homicidal, 1961). Fox even released a 1962 remake of Caligari, scripted by Psycho author Robert Bloch (it is very poor indeed).
Sanders is able to use the resources of a big studio, including Cinemascope, with some skill, and a distinguished cast, including Stuart Whitman, Carol Lynley and Ossie Davis as well as Bacall and McDowall, to make this seem much more of a movie than the endearingly nutty Castle would ever attempt. The camera moves, frequently and elegantly; there's a Jerry Goldsmith score, too.
The plot is more Shock Corridor than Psycho, with another impostor (Whitman) conning his way into a psychiatric hospital, this time to find out whether gentle maniac McDowell really burned a million dollars like the KLF after decapitating his employer, or whether he has it stashed somewhere, like you or I would. Whitman is an actor, and is hired for the job based on his performance as Macbeth, which seems an odd audition piece. Wouldn't something more naturalistic be better? Or, if you're going for an ironic connection, Hamlet?
Faking your way into an asylum is apparently not too hard, since they're designed to keep people in, not out, and instances of assumed lunacy are vanishingly rare for understandable reasons. They're not, in my limited experience, worth putting on a show to gain admittance. They're not happy places. The difficult part would be faking your way out, as our thespian anti-hero may discover.
An actor prepares: Whitman bones up on horticulture and abnormal psychology by reading What is Madness? and other helpful tomes so he can blag his way into the bughouse and befriend his mark. Then he smashes a store window, climbs through and takes off his shirt, donning shades and ranting about conformity as he's arrested. Because that's what crazy people do, right?
The movie goes like a train, deploying the direct cutting recently imported from Europe, keeping characterization to a minimum. On the other hand, rather than being a worthy successor to The Snake Pit (1948), or pursuing Sam Fuller's loopy political allegories, this movie is more in the tradition of the days when bedlams opened their doors to spectators, and we are invited to gaup at sensational displays of mental estrangement, as when a girl performs a striptease on the bus en route to hospital.
This being a shocker, the state hospital is weird and wonderful rather than merely depressing.
One of the traditional gags, following on from Poe's The System of Dr. Tar and Dr. Feather, is to blur the lines between staff and patients, and so the great Ossie Davis plays an ex-orderly who's now an inmate, but whose delusional system causes him to think he's still an orderly. By chance, I just saw the same jape perpetrated in an episode of The Illusionist. The old ones are the best. Still, it's good to see Davis given something to do, and in fact the film scores exceptionally well for casting Black actors in all kinds of roles (doctors, patients, jurors) without it being a plot point.
If Fuller's madhouse is nakedly America, its denizens afflicted by sociological issues, rather than mental ones, caricatured and distorted, what is Sanders'? Nobody seems to have thought of it as a microcosm, but of course it is one by default. I think it's a movie studio. McDowall, the former child star, was practically raised by Fox, and never quite became an adult actor: what you get with him is a set of tricks, a distinctive physical instrument, and that otherworldly essence. His fellow patients are each trapped in their own movie genre, according to their delusions: one a war movie, one a sex film... Ossie Davis even imagines he's in this film, which is the craziest fantasy of all. Bacall has one foot in a mad scientist film ("I've gone far beyond L.S.D.," she intones, having rendered a tiger catatonic with heavy meds) and Timothy Carey, who once attempted to break into Fox while clad in a full suit of plate armor (he wanted very much to be cast in Prince Valiant [1954]), is in whatever movie he normally thinks he's in. The only guy crazy enough, like Whitman in this movie, to want to break into a madhouse.
But, if Sanders lacks the compelling naturalism of Forman's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975) (which was in the service of a decades-out-of-date portrayal of psychiatric practice) or Litvak's The Snake Pit (in thrall to Freudianism, but compassionate and sharp-eyed) does he come up with any visual stratagems for the derangement of the senses? He has his moments: when Whitman gets the titular electro-convulsive therapy, the camera rockets up and away from his spasming form, like an out-of-body experience rendered visually. The fact that there are orderlies pinning our star down is odd, though: presumably, they'd each be getting their share of his 100 volts. One hopes they're well-paid.
But the director can't find the visual language—Fuller's indoor thunderstorms and superimpositions—for madness, even when the script begs him to. "Is my face changing?" asks Bacall, after stabbing her prey with tiger tranks. "Receding? Getting smaller?" Nope. Just a medium close-up, as before. Goldsmith goes nuts on the soundtrack, and some lap dissolves are poured on, but not during the scene, just as a kind of lame montage effect. Sanders just isn't crazy enough.
Where the film is most modern is its cynicism: everyone is either mad or rotten. Whitman is a venal creep, manipulating his way into McDowall's affections (good queer coding) to rob him of his ill-gotten gains; Bacall is also after the money, and the fact that she wants it for altruistic reasons (to fund her research) just makes her more dangerous.
There is a very good eleventh-hour twist (similar to one used in a very late Lang), followed rapidly by another (which I guessed, partly, but the movie's version of it is admirable). So the yarn aspect of the film is pretty satisfying—it could have gone even darker, and you sense that Goldsmith is pushing it that way—but I think the original story, by one Winfred Von Atta, a journalist who started penning shockers in the wake of Psycho, is a good one. And if no one has thought very much about meaning, they have at least left us with some interesting possibilities to consider.
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Forgotten by Fox is a regular fortnightly series by David Cairns, author of Shadowplay.