Shockproof

Fascinating and compromised in equal measure, Shockproof is the sight of two disparate auterists meeting and finding their work interfered with by the studio. It’s clear that anyone who knows Samuel Fuller or Douglas Sirk’s major works will know that ironies and undercurrents abound, as do endings that don’t give us the cleanest, tidiest wrap-up. The idea of the two of them making a movie together, in which the diseased heart of Fuller meets the delicate arched brow of Sirk, had the potential for cinematic nirvana. And then the studio brought in Helen Deutsch, of Lili and National Velvet fame, to rewrite the script and give the story a happy ending.

Oh well, I suppose, but the intended ending in which the square breaks bad sounds more plausible and probable for everything that preceded it instead of what we got. Our square stays a square and our bad girl reforms into the happy domestic. They find a way to end up together. Sirk loved Fuller’s original script (dubbing it “gutty”) and the studio went and lobotomized it.

We meet Jenny Marsh (Patricia Knight) a bottle blonde fresh out of the big house as he talks with her parole officer, Griff Marat (Cornel Wilde). Griff is clearly enamored with her from the jump, even if he’s consciously unaware of this fact, and goes above and beyond helping Jenny establish a life on the outside, including giving her a job taking care of his mother. But Jenny can’t quite stay away from Harry (John Baragrey), her toxic ex that keeps trying to get her to pull cons and a fast one on Griff.

Jenny winds up marrying Griff, killing Harry, and going on the lam (completed with new darker hair color). And it is in the earliest domestic scenes that Shockproof operates the best. Jenny’s continual sense of arrest, physical, mental, and domestic, creates a palpable tension as she tries to secret away to meet with Harry. Knight’s eyes are where you put your focus in her performance as her body language and reactions say one thing while her eyes say another. Are those crocodile tears or did she honestly transfer her affection from one possessive man to another?

Which is not to say that the last chunk of the film, in which they go on the run, is without merit. The escalating scenes of tension as they’re nearly caught and have to escape, always staying one step ahead, are a tableau of increasing destitution that reflects their emotional space. It becomes clear that these were supposed to be tarnished angels with dirty faces before Deutsch whiz-banged a happily ever after for the pair. That soft-suds rewrite downplays one of Sirk’s favorite subjects: the cost associated with breaching taboos.