Shock features an early Vincent Price performance - as one of his first real villains, in fact. Playing something of a mad doctor, the role is interesting as a mild precursor to those in his later, lurid horror films. Here, Price is conflicted in his evildoing, but since we in 2006 have already seen him in those later horror films, we know he has the capacity to do this evil even if he doesn't - a delicious bit of hindsight star persona which helps keep Shock interesting.
Otherwise, the cheap sets and unimaginative staging from director Alfred Werker prevent Shock from achieving more memorable heights. There are a few exceptions: a stylized dream sequence is well done, and a scene of an insane patient creeping through the asylum one stormy night is especially chilling.
The story essentially centers around the theme of psychiatry, a very popular movie subject in the 1940s. A young woman (Annabel Shaw) waits in a hotel room for her husband to rejoin her after traveling home from the war. While waiting, she witnesses Price commit a murder in another room and falls into a state of catatonic shock. Price turns out to be a psychiatrist and is called in to help Shaw. He helps himself instead by taking her to his asylum and plotting with his evil nurse (Lynn Bari) to make Shaw believe she is insane... While the film plays better than this outline makes it sound, it definitely has its outlandish elements. Still, it's a curio that's worth a look for Vincent Price fans.
John Stanley's commentary is rambling and hyper - not for all tastes - though he certainly knows a lot about the players' lives, especially Price's. He devotes most of his talk to these biographies rather than to the form and style of the movie itself. Picture and sound are excellent.
Fox Home Entertainment is starting to scrape the bottom of the barrel a little bit with its Fox Film Noir DVDs. Of the three latest releases in the otherwise first-class series - Shock, Vicki (1953), and Fourteen Hours (1951) - only Vicki is really a film noir, and a minor one at that. Of course there have now been 21 of these DVDs, so the studio is starting to run out of titles. But a few unreleased noirs remain, including The Brasher Doubloon (1947), The Thirteenth Letter (1951), Road House (1948), and the excellent Cry of the City (1948), not to mention Boomerang (1947), which was supposed to have been issued already but is tied up in legal problems. Let's hope there are still some more Fox Film Noirs to come.
For more information about Shock, visit Fox Home Video. To order Shock, go to TCM Shopping.
by Jeremy Arnold
