Shock

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.

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.

SHOCK hardly lives up to its promising title. It's a rather tepid little B&W thriller that serves only to remind us what VINCENT PRICE was like just as his career was beginning to take shape at Fox. As usual, he's at his best as a shady character, a doctor who commits a crime of passion only to find out that it has been witnessed by a woman neighbor. Annabel Shaw plays the woman who goes into shock after witnessing the crime--a performance that is not quite as riveting as it should be for this type of suspense yarn. The suspense lies in wondering how Price will deal with the woman. Lynn Bari is his cohort in keeping the crime away from the police.

It's a premise that has been used countless times, often to better advantage than it is here. Worthwhile for some suspenseful moments at Price's sanitarium but none of the suspense is milked for all it's worth. Frank Latimore does nicely as the husband whose wife has gone into shock after her traumatic witnessing of murder and Reed Hadley does a smooth job as a detective.

Modestly entertaining if you don't expect too much.

Some gifted people went to work on this one, including director Alfred Werker and star Vincent Price, but it doesn't work due to a slow pace and the absence of much movement within the film. There are too many scenes of people plotting evil deeds while a patient lies in a comatose state in bed. This does not make for an exciting movie experience. Nor is the story original, as it is hand-me-down Cornell Woolrich stuff about a young woman who witnesses a murder who is whisked off to a sanitarium by the killer, who just happens to be the psychiatrist who runs the place. The dialogue is mediocre and the actors, aside from Price, none too thrilling. I did like Reed Hadley as a police detective, whose late entry perks up the last part of the movie. He had a quiet, understated presence, and plays off nicely against Price, than whom he is almost as tall.

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.