Shock (Fox Film Noir)

Shock (Fox Film Noir)
by Alfred L. Werker

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DVD details

Actor: Anabel Shaw, Frank Latimore, Lynn Bari, Stephen Dunne, Vincent Price
Director: Alfred L. Werker
Brand: TWENTIETH CENTURY FOX HOME ENT
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Subtitled); English (Dubbed)
Format: Color, Dubbed, DVD-Video, Full Screen, NTSC, Subtitled
Picture Format: 1.33:1
Running Time: 70 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2006-08-29
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Studio: 20th Century Fox

DVD Reviews of Shock (Fox Film Noir)

DVD Review: Moral Of The Story: Don't Get Romantically Involved With Vincent Price
Summary: 4 Stars

"Shock" is a stark and creepy piece of moody melodrama from 1946, starring the wonderful Vincent Price as a psychiatrist caught in a snare of his own making.

The film opens with a young woman checking into a San Francisco hotel to meet her husband who is finally home from the war. While waiting she sees a man in an adjacent room kill his wife in a fit of rage. The woman promptly goes into shock. When the young soldier gets to the hotel, he finds his wife with wide eyes and unable to communicate. He rings for a doctor who refers the case to an eminent psychiatrist who happens to be the murderer.

Price admits her to his private sanitarium and sedates her while conditioning her to believe that what she saw was a figment of her imagination. He almost succeeds with the help of his mistress, but the soldier is very persistent in trying to help his wife. He enlists the help of another psychiatrist who, with the help of the police, is able to free the fragile, sedated wife. In the end Price also loses his temper with his mistress, and is ultimately led off to meet justice.

Certainly parts of the film are a bit contrived, but the acting is quite good, the script is tight (the film is only 70 minutes long), and the high-contrast black and white photography is excellent. My only complaint about the film is that the soundtrack is a bit muddled, and a few lines of dialogue are a bit difficult to understand.

This is an excellent example of mid 1940s film production, and I recommend it.

DVD Review: Worth Watching
Summary: 5 Stars

This is an excellent movie and well done. A young woman waiting in a hotel room for her husband (away at War, and whom she has not seen in a very long time), witnesses a murder in the room opposite. Reminiscent of "Rear Window". She goes into shock and that is the way her husband finds her when he arrives. The hotel calls a famous psychiatrist for help, the very man who his wife witnessed murdering a woman. The psychiatrist takes charge, whisking her away to his asylum and keeping her husband from her. Filled with suspense and with elements that seem Hitchkockian.

DVD Review: Not Film Noir
Summary: 3 Stars

Film noir sells. As a product category and a genre (in real world, rather than academic, terms) it possibly outsells all others except new releases. So, if movie companies can possibly package a product under a noir imprimatur, you bet they're going to do it, because it will maximize sales.

Meanwhile, movie critics and academics specializing in film noir are complicit in the matter since they've classified far too many movies as film noir, and spun rather farfetched, tortuously worded theories to support their aggrandizing notions.

As it happens, "Shock" is a rather tawdry thriller-horror film that has nothing to do with film noir, but which, nevertheless, is interesting if not terribly effective. It may become somewhat more compelling in your mind if you remind yourself that a real life medical monster was active and running around the country during this period, promoting his new procedure: pre-frontal lobotomy, which he performed quickly and often rather casually using ice picks. It would have been very interesting had Hollywood decided to produce a bio-pic of Dr. Walter Freeman, and chosen Vincent Price to play the leading role.

DVD Review: fantastic VINCENT PRICE
Summary: 5 Stars

this B movie became a A movie whit vincente price in the movie!
the plot is also great! the video transfer is very good also the audio commentary absolutely hilarious

DVD Review: Stop starting series!
Summary: 3 Stars

I really wish DVD companies will stop starting series like Fox Film Noir
and then abandon the concept midway.
"Shock" is a good addition to the series. But then Fox abruptly stopped it.
Shame on you, Fox.

Description of Shock (Fox Film Noir)

Film noir, a classic film style of the '40s and '50s, is noted for its dark themes, stark camera angles and high-contrast lighting. Comprising many of Hollywood's finest films, film noir tells realistic stories about crime, mystery, femmes fatales and conflict.

This post-World War II suspense thriller sets off an emotional roller coaster after the psychologically fragile wife of a POW (Anabel Shaw) witnesses a brutal murder from a hotel window while waiting to be reunited with her husband (Frank Latimer). By the time he arrives, she's nearly comatose with shock. The hotel's psychiatrist (Vincent Price) is called in to help. But just as she begins to recognize him as the murderer she saw, he realizes she was a witness to his crime. So he arranges to take her to his private sanitarium where he and his nurse-mistress (Lynn Bari) can insure that no one takes the young woman's ravings seriously and they can secretly administer enough "treatment" to silence her forever. Meanwhile, her husband and the police begin to suspect that everything is not as it seems and as they get closer to the truth, this complex mystery takes some unexpected twists!

Shock is an enjoyable film noir that belongs in a subgenre--let's call it the psychoanalytic murder melodrama--which flourished after the success of Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbound. Here, the set-up is delicious: nervous wife Anabel Shaw, already anxious about her soldier husband's delayed return home, witnesses a murder in a neighboring hotel room. Going into a deep state of--you guessed it--shock, she needs the care of San Francisco's leading psychiatrist, who just happens to be staying at the same hotel. Unfortunately, said analyst is none other than the murderer himself (Vincent Price), and he quickly realizes that if the lady comes out of her catatonic state, he'll be exposed for killing his wife. Things slow down once the action shifts to Price's private sanitarium, but Lynn Bari is fun to watch as his va-va-voom assistant/mistress/femme fatale, and Price himself indicates his young aptitude for the kind of sinister, tortured roles that would make him a mainstay of Edgar Allan Poe stories. There's also fun in listening to the psychoanalytic jargon spouted along the way, a distinctly Hollywood version of Freud. All in all, this unheralded 1946 picture counts at least as a minor rediscovery in the noir canon. --Robert Horton

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