On this week's blog on TCM's Movie Morlocks blog anticipates the upcoming release of a Sam Fuller Collection and the interesting intersection of talent for a brief time. This begins below:
Shockproof (1949), an intriguing attempt at a romantic noir in shades of black and white from Columbia Pictures, sprang from the imagination of two disparate filmmakers. Though they reportedly never met, this movie was crafted from a script fashioned by the outraged nihilist, Sam Fuller, and directed by the stylish master of domestic angst, Douglas Sirk. Originally entitled "The Lovers" by Fuller, the author described this tale as telling the story of "a woman who, in order to get her lover back, marries someone else." Fuller's rarely produced scripts of that period often bore titles such as "Murder: How to Get Away With It," and "Crime Pays", so he may not have been too surprised to see that the studio changed his story considerably by the time it premiered, starting with the title, which became the lurid-sounding Shockproof and altering considerably the doom-laden conclusion, much to Sirk's chagrin. Eventually, Fuller, who admired Sirk's markedly different style, just said that "[he] didn't give a damn what they called it", he was just grateful one of his postwar scripts had finally sold. I enjoyed aspects of this strange hybrid of a movie, and on reflection, saw that the pairing of a hard-boiled guy like Fuller with a silken master of suburban melodrama like Sirk may not have been all that odd, even if the resulting movie might have been more accurately entitled "Startleproof" instead.
Since seeing this movie a few weeks ago, I've learned that Shockproof is one of the long out of circulation films to be included in the upcoming boxed set from Sony, The Samuel Fuller Collection, set to go on sale on October 27th, 2009. Other DVDs in this set are It Happened in Hollywood (1937), Adventure in Sahara (1938), Power of the Press (1943), Scandal Sheet (1952), The Crimson Kimono (1959), and Underworld, U.S.A. (1961). Along with many others who like Douglas Sirk's less well known movies, such as Summer Storm (1944), Slightly French (1949) and The First Legion (1951), I'll hang in there waiting for a similarly sumptuous boxed set devoted to this German-born director...someday.
This film might easily fit into any proposed box set of Douglas Sirk's interesting films too, but there are some traces of Fuller's touch on this story. Despite obvious softening of the story by the producers, who brought in screenwriter (and co-producer) Helen Deutsch, the scenarist for National Velvet (1944) and Kim (1950), and the later schlock-fest, Valley of the Dolls (1967) , to make this odd story more palatable for mainstream audiences, there are moments when surfaces fall away, revealing the dark heart of this movie and the loneliness of the central characters. Though an unlikely glossy ending is tacked on to the story, the clear if sometimes ghostly traces of Sirk's concerns for the differences between appearances and reality and Fuller's starkness and characteristic quirks remain...more
