Shock (1946 film)

Shock is a 1946 American film noir directed by Alfred L. Werker and starring Vincent Price, Lynn Bari and Frank Latimore.[3]

Shock
Theatrical release poster
Directed byAlfred L. Werker
Produced byAubrey Schenck
Screenplay by
Story byAlbert DeMond
Starring
Music byDavid Buttolph
Cinematography
Edited byHarmon Jones
Production
company
20th Century Fox
Distributed by20th Century Fox
Release date
  • January 10, 1946 (1946-01-10) (United States)
Running time
70 minutes
CountryUnited States
LanguageEnglish
Budget$350,000[1]
Box office$800,000[2]

Plot

A psychiatrist, Dr. Cross (Vincent Price), is treating a young woman, Janet Stewart (Anabel Shaw), who is in a coma-state, brought on when she heard loud arguing, went to her window and saw a man strike his wife with a candlestick and kill her. Lynn Bari is Dr. Cross's nurse/lover, Elaine Jordan.

As Stewart comes out of her shock, she recognizes Dr. Cross as the killer. He then takes her to his sanitarium and at Elaine's urging, gives Janet an overdose of insulin under the pretense of administering insulin shock therapy. He can't bring himself to murder her in cold blood, though, and asks Elaine to get the medicine to save her. Elaine refuses, they argue, and he strangles her. A colleague of Dr. Cross, Dr. Harvey, saves Janet's life and Dr. Cross is taken into custody by a lawyer from the District Attorney's office.

Cast

Production

The film was originally to be directed by Henry Hathaway.[1]

Reception

Above and beyond the typical characteristics of the horror film genre, reviewer Bosley Crowther of The New York Times took particular offense to the film's treatment of Price as a psychiatrist who attempts to do away with his patient, a woman who has lost her mind after witnessing the murder her own doctor had committed. Coming in the wake of World War II, in which so many people had suffered shock and could benefit from treatment of their anxieties, Crowther asked the "critical observer to protest in no uncertain tones" the movie's "social disservice" in its fostering "apprehension against the treatment of nervous disorders", deploring the lack of consideration for those in need of treatment evidenced by producer Aubrey Schenck and distributor Twentieth Century-Fox.[4] Philip K. Scheuer of the Los Angeles Times took no such offense, calling the film a "nominal 'B' feature", which screenplay author "Eugene Ling and Director Alfred Werker have imbued... with a grade-A suspense".[5] Jonathan Malcolm Lampley wrote in Women in the Horror Films of Vincent Price that his role in this film "foreshadows the mad doctors and scientists Price would frequently portray in his later career".[6]

gollark: I think people have (obviously very roughly) estimated that you would need something like an exabyte of storage and exaflop of processing power to run a brain.
gollark: We have quantum computing to some extent now. It's not magic. It just does some operations faster.
gollark: I'm not very hopeful about brain uploading soon, since brains are very complex, poorly understood in some bits, and would be very computationally intensive to simulate.
gollark: A good design would have it periodically back up to some kind of persistent storage, but noooo...
gollark: But the brain runs on not-very-persistent storage, and if you're "dead" too long some kind of cascade failure thing means you're stuck that way.

See also

References
  1. Tom Weaver, It Came from Horrorwood: Interviews with Moviemakers in the SF and Horror Tradition McFarland, 2000 p 271
  2. Aubrey Solomon, Twentieth Century-Fox: A Corporate and Financial History Rowman & Littlefield, 2002 p 221
  3. Shock at the American Film Institute Catalog.
  4. Crowther, Bosley. "The Screen; Bad Medicine", The New York Times, March 9, 1946. Accessed July 2, 2009.
  5. Scheuer, Philip K. "'Shock' Joins Procession of 'Psychos'", Los Angeles Times, March 7, 1946. Accessed July 2, 2009.
  6. Lampley, Jonathan Malcolm (2010). Women in the Horror Films of Vincent Price. McFarland & Company. p. 17. ISBN 9780786457496.
  7. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45oBsqJ8MGM
  8. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ekfn8ira6oc
  9. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XYbwN-wnYE8
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