User reviews

This movie is one of those that's great to watch in the dark with popcorn, on a rainy night, or come to think of it, pretty much anytime. The actors are great, and the mood is very intense. Whitman was early in his career, McDowell does his usual stellar work, and Lauren Bacall gives one of her best performances as someone who belongs in the asylum, not running it. This is a great old flick that deserves a lot more recognition that it gets. If you watch it, and like it, tell others about it so the word can be spread. This deserves to be released on DVD if it hasn't already, and should be mentioned with the other great Hollywood thrillers.

This film had some intense moments. Stuart Whitman is sent into a mental institution to pretend he is insane in order to spy on inmate Roddy Macdowell and find out where he might have hidden $1 million. Lauren Bacall plays the doctor/research scientist who is very much interested in the money as well.

With her own animal torture lab(in California and Africa!), and grumbling that she cant perform dangerous experiments the way she'd like to...we get a picture early on that she isnt Florence Nightingale! There are a couple of scenes that were as disturbing as comparable moments from One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and the Marathon Man.

Although i found the film decent enough--with fine performances from the leads, and a good ending, it did seem a bit rushed in places, and some supporting characters either had unwarranted emphasis(Carol Lynley) or too little(Ossie Davis, Bert Freed). The rest of the patients seemed to be borrowed from "the Snake Pit."

As a 1960's suspense flick it wasnt bad, but this would be a great contender for a remake.

Stuart Whitman is seen in a classical acting role and recruited to play a very rough part: He is to be paid for feigning insanity and being committed to psychiatric hospital. The goal is to learn more about a character played by Roddy McDowell, who is confined there.

Whitman is excellent, as is McDowell. The latter develops a bit of an unstated crush on the former. So does Carol Lynley, who has a very small role for the major billing she gets.

The plot revolves around psychiatrist and researcher Lauren Bacall. This character could give Dr. Caligari a run for his money.

It's not hough art but i's exciting and suspenseful. And the acting is excellent all around.

A sort of cousin to Samuel Fuller's "Shock Corridor" (a slightly earlier and far more inventive film), this mental ward drama concerns an actor who feigns illness in order to enter a state asylum and discover the whereabouts of one million dollars. McDowall plays a rose-obsessed gardener who snips the head off of his employer and is committed to the state mental hospital (hilariously, he gets 90 days for his crime and then is to be released!) When it is discovered that McDowall may have hidden away a million bucks of his employer's money, Laire hires Whitman to play nutty and enter the same hospital as McDowall in order to find out where it is. Bacall plays a doctor who helped get McDowall off on an insanity plea in the first place and who may be after the money herself. Lynley is a manic-depressive girl who catches Whitman's eye. Before long Whitman finds that it's easier to get into a mental hospital than it is to get out (though getting out doesn't present TOO great a challenge to him either!) The film has a nice assortment of familiar actors in it and a decent score by Jerry Goldsmith, but it's never as interesting or surprising as one might like it to be. Whitman was rarely a deep or particularly detailed actor and his work here is adequate, but unexceptional. McDowall is properly off-center and does a fine job, but isn't really used much. Faring worse is Lynley, whose character is sketchy at best and whose screen time is both limited and mostly unimportant. (Sadly, these two future "The Poseidon Adventure" co-stars share no screen time here.) Bacall does fine as the haughty, embittered doctor overseeing all the cuckoos, but by the end her character and the film's plot line have gone way off the deep end. The ending is preposterous in the extreme. The whole movie suffers from unbelievability, though. It doesn't help matters that the hospital seems more like a retreat or a club than a medical facility. The patients (even newly admitted murderers and other troublemakers) have free reign to do as they please with little supervision and get to smoke anytime they wish, go to dances and just generally hang out and have a good time! To say that the attention paid to mental illness and its cures is superficial is an understatement. This makes "The Caretakers" look like a deep exposé on the subject. Still, it's a fairly brief, occasionally intriguing movie with an interesting enough hook to warrant a look.

Stuart Whitman is a money-hungry actor who is hired to fake insanity in order to find $1 million in "Shock Treatment." The film also stars Lauren Bacall, Roddy McDowell, Carol Lynley, and Ossie Davis. When asked about this film, Lauren Bacall commented, "You have no idea what Roddy and I went through making that movie." I don't, and frankly, it's a little hard to tell what the problems were from the filming. It seemed pretty straightforward. She plays a doctor who would have found a good home on Josef Mengele's staff. McDowell is a patient in the asylum who killed his wealthy boss and then supposedly burned her money. No one believes that, and Whitman is hired to find out where he hid it.

It turns out, he's not the only one interested, and things become pretty dangerous for him. The movie seems to meander along, and then becomes rather exciting toward the end. It was directed and filmed in an uninteresting way, so it's not as good as it could have been.

If you ever have a hunch that a movie you saw in your youth was good, give your memory the benefit of the doubt, because you may be surprised once or twice: now, 52 years after its release in cinemas, I have bought a copy of "Shock Treatment" that was made in Germany (with Spanish subtitles!) with above average quality, and I found out how good it is. No wonder I had not forgotten this movie, even if I could not remember the plot. It is definitely not a serious drama, for it mixes a touch of camp and humor in a story that borders on horror and science-fiction, played with gusto by everybody, especially Lauren Bacall as a wicked psychiatrist. On the other hand, if you approach it as a straight psychological drama, you will find that scriptwriter Sydney Boehm was quite sincere and treated the "psychic elements" of the story with all the respect you could expect in 1964, to add as much realism and credibility as he could to such a wacky tale. Everybody in the cast seems to be having a field day: Stuart Whitman was in his best years doing his usual hunk hero number, Roddy McDowall was quite effective as a psycho killer with loads of homoerotic sensibility, Carol Lynley has more than enough screen time to portray a troubled girl whose natural sensuality was repressed by her mother, and Bacall is wonderfully mean as the highly unethical head of a mental hospital. Director Denis Sanders had a very curious career: he did everything, from bee girls' horror to documentaries about Elvis Presley and soul music, and the compelling war drama "War Hunt" with John Saxon as a schizophrenic soldier, plus two works that have been declared National Film Registry by the US Congress: the moving Civil War short "A Time Out of War" and the documentary "Czechoslovakia 1968". Here he is also in good shape, effectively handling the story and immensely helped by Sam Leavitt's beautiful black & white / wide-screen cinematography. Jerry Goldsmith, who had worked in "Freud" in 1962, composed here another good score for "mental matters". In fact, 1964 was an excellent year for Goldsmith, who also wrote great dramatic music for "Rio Conchos" and "Fate Is the Hunter". If you do not sit waiting for a masterpiece, turn off the lights, ignore your cell phone and take it as fun, as a tale of greed and nutty plans, with fantasy solutions played by good actors, and you will probably enjoy "Shock Treatment" as much as I did.

Mental shenanigans involving out-of-work actor (Stuart Whitman), so desperate for money he'll accept any insane proposition lobbied his way, masquerading as a new patient at an asylum. He's hoping to get crucial information out of another patient (Roddy McDowall) on the whereabouts of some hidden loot, but unfortunately runs afoul of doctor Lauren Bacall (doing a Nurse Ratched years before her time). Delirious, over-the-top melodrama that's actually a hoot if watched in the requisite silly spirit. Whitman keeps a straight face throughout and actually wins the viewer over, but McDowall is just awful and Carol Lynley is hilariously mercurial as an inmate with glossy, shampooed hair. This show rightfully belongs to Bacall, pulling off an extreme role with her usual rigid-jaw aplomb. ** from ****

This film is pure camp. It was part of a slew of early 60s nuthouse exploitation films. It tries to be racy which makes it even more hilarious.

Funny that I watched SHOCK CORRIDOR last week and read ONE FLEW OVER A COCKOO NEST again two days ago. I did not foresee this program. The two best stories ever about mental institutions; but I am sure there are some more, unknown, from Eastern Europe countries for instance. Anyway, this film starring Stu Whitman and Lauren Bacall, is very good too. Bacall is excellent in this role of the evil woman, she is effective at one hundred percent, but her character - AND NOT HER PERFORMANCE - is not as powerful as Louise Fletcher's one in Milos Forman's masterpiece. The role of the female master, the Devil's sidekick in charge of the lead actor and the mental institution. Yes, this film, though not being on the same scale of the other two is worth watching, even less depressing and gloomy too. I don't know if it was released in France. Not sure. You can prefer THE SNAKE PIT, from director Anatole Litvak, psychiatric institutions shown from another angle.

This is a very unusual role for Stuart Whitman, who was more at home as cowboys, western heroes and partners with John Wayne, but here he has for once a very interesting role, as an actor who is paid to act a lunatic at an asylum to investigate murky business there, like hiding a million dollars, which the doctor, Lauren Bacall in one of her best parts ever, suspects one of the patients to have hidden away. That patient is Roddy McDowall, and the best scenes are with him and Stuart Whitman together, one really mad and the other acting mad just to get the right information, which finally the doctor (Bacall) finally succeeds in extorting by her medicines and psychiatric tricks, all three are at their very best in acting, but Lauren Bacall actually takes the prize. I have seldom laughed so heartily as at her grand finale, while this actually is a very serious and moral tale, about the vainglory and futility of money. All three are magnificent, and although there are some really revolting scenes hard to digest, the actor does get the better of the actor (Whitman), while that million dollars finally actually is found, exactly in the very condition which Roddy McDowall all the time has insisted, and yet not in quite the expected form.