Shock (1946)
Shock (1946)
Primary Genre:
Psychological thriller
Secondary Genres: Melodrama, film noir, Iron Age B movie
Plot
A woman (Lynn Bari) witnesses a brutal killing, driving her into psychological shock, and the doctor called in to treat her is the killer. After she comes out of shock and starts telling people who and what she saw, the doctor explains away her accusations as common delusions psych patients have about their doctors. But after police find evidence of his crime and it matches what she has been saying, he’s under pressure to kill her.
Good Stuff
Satisfying payoff at the climax.
Price’s character isn’t purely evil, but he does have an anger management issue. (It’s how he got into this mess.) Unlike most antagonists, we are shown his temptation to go consciously evil, and then his girlfriend (Anabel Shaw) goes all Lady Macbeth on him and pushes him to permanently silence the witness so he doesn't go to prison and they can stay together.
And it all clocks in at a svelte eighty minutes.
Bad Stuff
Unlikely coincidence syndrome Yeah, it’s just a B movie, and plot twists often depend on seemingly unlikely events, but unlikely coincidences in movie plots are among my pet peeves. (Of all the doctors that could’ve been called in, what are the odds that the one that shows up has a reason to keep her from recovering?)
B movie. That doesn’t make it a bad movie, but it does mean it’s probably not as good as it could have been if it had been an A picture. (On the other hand, B movies often have to be more creative than A pictures, but we're not seeing that kind of creativity here, possibly because it was made with the support of a major studio.)
Public domain It’s easy to find a copy, but finding a good copy might not be so straightforward.
Despite its relatively short run time, it drags a bit in the middle. You discover most stuff in the plot near the beginning and near the end. (Possible they could’ve started at the point in the story where the woman is being treated and then showing us what she witnessed during flashbacks as she comes out of shock, but they probably weren't under pressure to be that creative.)
Given when this was made (post WWII), where it takes place (San Francisco), who’s in it (Price), a bad dame (the girlfriend), and the antagonist’s initial moral ambiguity, you could successfully argue this is a film noir. But as with Gaslight, this movie is more like a melodramatic psychological thriller than a film noir.
I also categorize this as an “Iron Age B movie” because it was made with secondary studio talent with help but limited support from a major studio (so it's a B movie), and it was made before the Golden Age of B movies, which happened from the early 1950s to the first half of the 1960. (That's a story for another day.)
Scorecard:
Surreal dream sequences::1
Ominous thunderstorms: 1
Bottom Line
Suspenseful little Iron Age B psychological thriller with a relatively youthful Vincent Price before he became famous for playing super menacing bad guys. It's in the public domain, so all it will cost you to watch it is your time.
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