Tag Archives: Renee Carson
Shock (Jan. 10, 1946)
Posted on March 3, 2010 by Adam Lounsbery
Alfred L. Werker's thriller Shock, which had its premiere on January 10, 1946, and went into wide release on February 1st, stars Vincent Price as the murderous Dr. Richard Cross and Lynn Bari as his manipulative assistant and lover, Nurse Elaine Jordan. If you were to play a drinking game in which you took a shot of whiskey every time one of the characters in the film said the word "shock," you would likely require medical attention after the first 20 minutes.
Price wasn't always a horror icon. In Tower of London (1939), which was as much a costume drama about Richard III as it was a horror picture, he was a supporting player. In Brigham Young (1940), he played the founder of Mormonism, Joseph Smith. In Hudson's Bay (1941), he played King Charles II. In Laura (1944) and Leave Her to Heaven (1945), he was the aggrieved "other man." A tall, stately man born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1911, Price was educated at Yale, where he studied art history and fine art. He radiated charm and erudition. He was a fine actor, and probably could have distinguished himself in any genre. As chance or fate would have it, however, his vocal delivery and arch facial expressions were perfectly suited to the ironic cinematic world of the macabre, and he is best remembered for his roles in horror pictures such as House of Wax (1953), The Fly (1958), House on Haunted Hill (1959), The Tingler (1959), and the innumerable Roger Corman-produced, Poe-influenced horror pictures that he appeared in throughout the 1960s.
While Shock is not a horror film, it has elements of one, and it's the earliest role I've seen Price play in which he demonstrates some of the ghoulish mannerisms that would later make him famous. He doesn't come close to the histrionics of some of his later horror roles, but there are some glimmerings.
The film opens in San Francisco, where a young woman named Janet (played by the somewhat sickly looking ingénue Anabel Shaw), is checking into a hotel, where she is to meet her husband, Lt. Paul Stewart (Frank Latimore), a former P.O.W. who is finally returning from World War II. Lt. Stewart doesn't show up when he is supposed to, however, and as his emotionally fragile wife frets alone in her hotel room, she witnesses a murder. From her balcony, she can see through the window of an adjacent room. A man and a woman are arguing, and eventually the man settles the argument with a heavy candlestick.
Witnessing a murder drives Janet into a state of catatonic shock. When her husband finally arrives, she is unresponsive. When world-renowned psychiatrist Dr. Cross is brought in to consult in the case, Janet doesn't recognize him, but Dr. Cross immediately realizes that the cause of Janet's state of shock is the murder she witnessed him committing.
Janet is placed in Dr. Cross's care, and he ignores the Hippocratic oath in order to save his own skin, giving Janet insulin treatments she doesn't need, as well as using other unethical methods of driving her deeper into a state of shock so she will never be able to identify him. Cross isn't portrayed as a total monster, however. That role is reserved for his lover, Nurse Jordan, a Lady Macbeth type who goads him on when his resolve to be wicked falters.
Shock is a programmer, to be sure, but it's a well-made one, and kept me enthralled for all of its 70 minutes.
Posted in 1946, February 1946, January 1946 and tagged 20th Century-Fox, Albert DeMond, Alfred L. Werker, Anabel Shaw, Aubrey Schenck, Cecil Weston, Charles Tannen, Charles Trowbridge, Claire Richards, David Buttolph, Eugene Ling, Film Noir, Frank Latimore, George E. Stone, Glen MacWilliams, Harmon Jones, Horror, John Davidson, Joseph MacDonald, Lynn Bari, Margaret Brayton, Martin Berkeley, Mary Young, Pierre Watkin, Reed Hadley, Renee Carson, Robert Adler, Ruth Clifford, Selmer Jackson, Shock, Stephen Dunne, Vincent Price. Bookmark the permalink.
The House on 92nd Street (Sept. 10, 1945)
When The House on 92nd Street was released on DVD in 2005, it was as part of the "Fox Film Noir" collection. This is misleading, since it's more of a docudrama than it is a noir. It's a historically important film, however, since it was one of the first to feature location shooting for nearly all the exteriors, and one of the first to skillfully blend fact with fiction while presenting itself as essentially factual. (Charles G. Booth won an Academy Award for best original story for his work on this film.)
The House on 92nd Street stars William Eythe as Bill Dietrich, a second-generation German-American who becomes a double agent for the F.B.I., Lloyd Nolan as his contact in the Bureau, Agent George A. Briggs, and Signe Hasso as the leader of the spy ring, Elsa Gebhardt. The film is a fictionalized account of the F.B.I.'s 1941 operation against the Nazi spy ring led by Fritz Joubert Duquesne. It was one of the largest counterspy operations in U.S. history, and led to the conviction of 33 people. In reality, however, none of them were involved in anything quite as grand as the secrets of the atomic bomb, which is the MacGuffin in The House on 92nd Street. And the real Dietrich was not the all-American boy portrayed by Eythe. He actually was a German-born man named William G. Sebold who served in the German army during World War I but became a naturalized American citizen in 1936. Presumably the war was still too fresh in the minds of the American viewing public for them to accept a German as the hero of a picture.
This film also shows the beginnings of J. Edgar Hoover's massive publicity campaign for the F.B.I., which he disguised as a simple display of information. In reality, of course, Hoover carefully controlled the information that the public saw about the F.B.I., twisting and distorting as necessary. A good example of this information control is a scene early in the film, in which we see an indoor enclosure the size of an airplane hangar, filled with filing cabinets. The booming voice of the narrator (Reed Hadley) explains that this is the F.B.I.'s collection of 100 million sets of fingerprints, a number that seems unlikely, given that the population of the United States was fewer than 140 million people in 1945. Were they counting each finger? The message, of course, is that there is no hiding from the F.B.I. If you commit a federal crime or spy for another nation, they will find you. (This was also the message of the radio show This Is Your F.B.I., which began broadcasting dramatizations of real federal cases on American Broadcasting Company stations in the spring of 1945, all with the cooperation of Hoover, who called it "the finest dramatic program on the air," and "our show.")
The House on 92nd Street was directed by Henry Hathaway, but much of its style can be attributed to producer Louis de Rochemont, who created the "March of Time" newsreel series. When he lacked the footage he wanted, de Rochemont would stage clever recreations, but his newsreels were presented as wholly factual. It's important to keep in mind that American audiences were less savvy about media trickery in 1945. After all, it had only been six years since people tuned into Orson Welles's War of the Worlds broadcast midway through the program and thought Martians were vaporizing people in New Jersey.
The House on 92nd Street begins with a compilation of actual footage of people entering and exiting the German embassy, which is interesting. Of course, the characters in this film watch a great deal of surveillance footage. Some of it is real, some is not. It's not that audiences in 1945 didn't realize that the film was a blending of reenactments and actual footage, it's the overall message they were taking away from the film that was perhaps not completely accurate. For instance, in Thomas M. Pryor's September 27, 1945 review of the film in the New York Times, he wrote the following:
Since the picture, produced by Twentieth Century-Fox with full cooperation from the F.B.I., was completed some months ago, the secret of the atomic bomb has been revealed. Now the picture carries a simple and restrained foreword explaining that the "Process 97" which the Nazi agents are attempting to steal was in reality a part of the atomic bomb formula. It is to the producers' everlasting credit that this information is not sensationalized in the film.
In reality, however, there is no evidence that there was a single "missing piece" of the atomic bomb process that spies were in danger of transmitting back to Nazi Germany. And of course, film by its very nature presents a sensationalized picture of reality.
Also, a big deal is made at the beginning of the picture that every person playing an F.B.I. agent, aside from the principals, is an actual F.B.I. agent. This, however, does not make what is depicted any more or less truthful than if they were played by actors, but it seems to.
The House on 92nd Street is not a bad picture by any stretch. Taken at face value, it's tense and exciting. And director Hathaway, when not constrained by the documentary-style approach of de Rochemont, creates some great sequences, such as when Dietrich gets himself arrested just to get in touch with Briggs at the F.B.I., or the meeting between Dietrich and his co-conspirators at a waterfront dive. And the final shootout, which involves tear gas grenades and a surprising disguise, is fantastic. If you're looking for a film that uses the framework of a docudrama to present a tense film noir, however, you'd be better off watching Anthony Mann's excellent T-Men (1947).
Posted in 1945, September 1945 and tagged 18th Academy Awards, 20th Century-Fox, Alfred Linder, Barré Lyndon, Bruno Wick, Charles G. Booth, Charles Wagenheim, David Buttolph, Docudramas, Espionage Thrillers, F.B.I., Film Noir, Fritz Joubert Duquesne, Gene Lockhart, Harmon Jones, Harro Meller, Harry Bellaver, Henry Hathaway, J. Edgar Hoover, John Monks Jr., Leo G. Carroll, Lloyd Nolan, Louis de Rochemont, Lydia St. Clair, Norbert Brodine, Renee Carson, Signe Hasso, The House on 92nd Street, Thomas M. Pryor, William Eythe, William Post, World War II. Bookmark the permalink.
@FindShotFirst Shadow of a Doubt 10 hours ago