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Volume 27, Number 1 (2003) reprinted by permission Legal Studies Forum TRUE CRIME ANTHONY CHASE* “Once you whet the public’s appetite for the truth, the sky’s the limit.” – Hush-Hush Editor, Sid Hudgens (Danny DeVito)In Blood and Ink: An International Guide to Fact-Based Crime Literature, Albert Borowitz has accomplished the seemingly impossible: he has produced a unique reference book a couple of inches thick that is written throughout with grace and style. While there are some very good reference works available on both the history of crime and violence, on the one hand, and the development of the mystery or detective novel, on the other, I know of no book which includes within its ambit only that particular genre of writing with which Borowitz appears to be more familiar than perhaps any other living human being–“fact-based crime literature.” Borowitz does not treat his enterprise as problematic–like the pathologist working in his laboratory, he succinctly and systematically outlines the scope of his project. The subject matter covered by his guide can be divided into two subcategories. The first includes “nonfictional accounts of crimes and criminal trials, including essays, monographs, journalism, editions of court transcripts, prison histories, and criminal and police biographies and memoirs” and the second subcategory includes “works of imaginative literature, such as novels, stories, or stage works, based on, or inspired by, actual crimes or criminals.” The clarity of Borowitz’s focus in Blood and Ink, the relatively rigorous and unyielding parameters he has placed about his categories, and his discipline in sticking to his own rules make Blood and Ink a tightly drawn and highly functional encyclopedia of true crime. What a steady hand has governed the process of selection, a process decisive to the quality of any dictionary, guide, or encyclopedia organized on such a grand scale. The second remarkable thing about Blood and Ink is its international scope of reference. Borowitz knowledgeably provides introductory discussions to the national true crime narrative tradition of cultures and regions around the globe. Several years ago, a colleague asked if I might suggest some motion pictures portraying the trial process in “third world” countries. While I could think of a few, I was struck by how difficult it would be for anyone to have sufficient familiarity with the national cinemas of different countries to be able to assemble even an initial annotated filmography. But it is something much more than this that Borowitz has fashioned with respect to a world panorama of true crime literature. Most important of all, the individual entries included in Blood and Ink, which range in length from several paragraphs to a couple of pages, are a joy to read. They are smart, detailed, technical, intellectual. They are also modest, graceful, and filled with telling anecdote and apt illustration. Borowitz’s writing betrays the human touch. The entries are organized alphabetically, usually by author name, and thus one can utilize a variety of reading strategies ranging from going directly to a specific writer or work to reading several consecutive entries at a time or even opening the book at random. But regardless of strategy, one can always count on learning something new. Readers of P.D. James, especially of her co-written, The Maul and the Pear Tree: The Ratcliffe Highway Murders 1811, will be pleased to find Borowitz has included an exhaustive entry on the Notable British Trials Series. The volume in that series dealing with the Trial of the Seddons, it will be recalled, made a key appearance in James’ recent novel of the British legal profession, A Certain Justice. To provide just one brief illustration of Borwitz’s facility with anecdote, consider the entry on Joseph Kessel. Readers of 20th century French history or fans of French filmmaker Alain Resnais, will likely be familiar with the Stavisky Affair. Kessel’s recollections in Serge Stavisky, The Man I Knew, are the subject of one Borowitz entry and he concludes his sketch on this note: “A touching detail in Kessel’s reminiscences is the absolute assurance of the Hotel Claridge’s staff that their popular guest Stavisky would not return after his sudden departure in December, 1933: they noted he had packed photographs of his children, to whom he was strongly attached.” The rogue Stavisky was played of course, in Resnais’ film, by Jean-Paul Belmondo. By giving a reasonably narrow interpretation to the phrase “based on, or inspired by, actual crime or criminals,” Borowitz is able to confine his compendium to “only” about five hundred pages. But what if we were to expand the borderlands of true crime beyond what Borowitz has envisioned in Blood and Ink? “In good crime fiction,” Jacques Barzun says in his introductory note to the book, “the victim is disposed of quickly and with a minimum of physical detail. In true crime the detail may indeed form part of the recital [but] the evidence is soon left behind in the quest for motive and circumstance.” It is easy to conceive the true crime genre in ways that deviate radically from Barzun’s proscription. “Serial killers,” says Jonathan Goodman, in his foreword to Blood and Ink, “are not my cup of tea. They bore me, not merely through the repetitiousness and the sameness of their crimes . . . .” It is, however, that repetitiousness which seems not only to provoke popular fascination with serial killers but box office records for motion pictures like “Silence of the Lambs” and “The Bone Collector.” So what if we took a few steps back from where Barzun and Goodman begin and start again, more or less from scratch? What is true crime? It depends: first we need to ask who wishes to know. Lawyers, judges, and legislators want to know in order to be able to distinguish legal from illegal conduct. Only where there is true crime– “actual guilt,” to paraphrase Messrs. Dwyer, Neufeld & Scheck–can there be just punishment. Historians and sociologists want to know in order to better understand how and why societies define certain beha-vior as criminal. Journalists want to know so they can report the stories people want to read about or look at on the evening news. Publishers and bookstore managers want to know so they can sell books and make sure titles are located throughout the store exactly where customers expect them to be. Cultural studies academics want to know so they can nail the genre’s definition and accurately plot its parameters. Moviemakers and novelists want to know too. In fact film and fiction, the popular arts and literature, can provide a common denominator, a coin of the realm, a shared cultural field of experience within which disparate conversations about true crime might be reduced to a single language. Where might true crime issues arise within the legal sphere? In slander and defamation cases–at least where truth is a complete defense (Oliver North actually was a criminal, wasn’t he?) Perhaps in contract where a commercial exchange may create real obligations, though not ones enforceable in a court of law if the transaction was itself criminal in nature. But clearly in the criminal law. Insanity The insanity defense presents one of the most controversial of true crime inquiries. No matter how horrific an act, it is not criminal where, by reason of mental disease or defect, the perpetrator did not know his act was wrong or was incapable of distinguishing right from wrong. A crazy kid shoots the President, a mother drowns her children, a killer takes instructions from a dog: psychotic disorders which preclude cogni-tive appreciation of wrongfulness exculpate (in theory). While there are many movies that deal with the insanity defense as subject matter (preeminently, Preminger’s “Anatomy of a Murder”), there are also a few which directly or indirectly reflect on the true crime issue itself. How can mental disease, if it exists at all, somehow preclude a person from being responsible for what they have done? How can the insanity defense produce a not guilty verdict, i.e., you committed the offensive act but are somehow not guilty of having done it? Insanity, we are told, prevents true criminality. In “A Beautiful Mind,” John Nash has an amusing college roommate who, in reality, does not exist. There is a reason for this. ‘Schizophrenia’ does refer to a split–but not that of a split personality, a real but quite rare disorder more common to television than human psychology. The schizophrenic split is between illusion and reality, or what we normally take to be those clearly divided realms. So John Nash’s roommate is from the illusory or imagined realm of psychotic disease. The only thing is, the filmmaker (Ron Howard) does not let the audience in on this bit of useful information until half way through the film. The point, at least in part, is that audiences completely believe in the roommate’s existence and do not give that fact a second thought until it becomes obvious it is no fact at all. The conventions of film-making are sufficiently ingrained that no audience member would feel a fool for having taken the roommate seriously. No clues or foreshadowing were provided–not even the very subtle variety as to gender in Neil Jordan’s “The Crying Game.” If viewer’s of “A Beautiful Mind” suffer no recrimination for their misplaced faith in a character’s existence, why should jurors be so skeptical of the disordered defendant’s plea of insanity? He really did not know what he was doing. Can this be believed? Did you not regard John Nash’s roommate as real until the two spheres were brought into focus, as if through a camera’s viewfinder–via director disclosure (in film) or medication (psychiatry)? Just as Gene Hackman’s character employs artifice in Michael Apted’s “Extreme Measures” to give Hugh Grant a brief but powerful sense of what total paralysis might be like, Ron Howard provides viewers with his own theatrical confection–a taste of schizophrenia. Nash’s imaginary roommate, however briefly, is as real to the audience as he is to Nash. So that is what it is like! The case of purposefully untrustworthy narration is certainly an important one in the history of story-telling. H.P. Lovecraft used it; so did Poe and his devoted successor, Jorge Luis Borges. Is Guy Pearce’s enigmatic character the untrustworthy narrator in Christopher Nolan’s “Memento”? Or is it simply a case of the audience never knowing anything more than Pearce knows, or remembers, which is not a lot? Certainly Yale History graduate Edward Norton, in David Fincher’s “Fight Club,” provides us with a classically untrustworthy narrator, one in whom we placed so much faith in contrast to his own (eventually illusive) roommate. Setting this narrative device to one side, however, the point is that “A Beautiful Mind” and “Fight Club” give their audiences a direct experience of the potential brittleness of the truth in true crime. For the criminally insane, truth genuinely may not be what it seems. But the uncertainty which can infect true crime may arise other than from mental disease. It was not delusion, after all, but its close companion, the dream, which inspired so many film critics (especially the French) to analogize cinema-viewing to dreaming. But then Hollywood was always regarded as “the dream factory.” Can it get any better than David Lynch’s “Mulholland Drive”? Of course you have to see the film several times to begin feeling comfortable with it and, to be sure, there are a million moments without talk, without even sound, gazing at objects, thinking it through. In Arthur Penn’s “Night Moves,” Gene Hackman’s private eye compares watching Eric Rohmer’s films to “watching paint dry.” That Sergio Leone was not allowed to go slow, hold the shot, and speak through music in “Once Upon a Time in America” (his film was butchered prior to initial distribution and exhibition in the U.S.) while David Lynch managed to do just that even on network television (“Twin Peaks”) is a bitter irony for the Italians. “From the moment Betty and Rita leave [Club Silencio],” says Village Voice critic, J. Hoberman, “the narrative begins to fissure. Mulholland Drive flows from one situation to the next, one scene seeping into another, like the decomposing corpse I’ve neglected to mention that’s at the story’s center. Characters dissolve. Settings deteriorate. Situations break down and reconstruct themselves sometimes as fantasy, sometimes as a movie.”1 The visual language of psychosis, dream, cinema: all forms of narration, spectacularly unreal, trying desperately to get it right. “It’ll be just like in the movies,” says Betty (Naomi Watts), “[w]e’ll pretend to be someone else.” What happens to Betty in that L.A. bungalow: true crime, true suicide, true resurrection? Entrapment The entrapment defense is employed by individuals charged with crime who claim that, in effect, the government made them do it. Because defendants admit so much up front (e.g., that they did it), the entrapment defense is rarely successful. But Washington, D.C.’s mayor Marion Barry prevailed (by and large) in his criminal trial because he turned down the invitation to smoke crack cocaine (on video) so many times. How many times do you have to say no? The entrapment defense only works where defendants convince jurors the police initiated the crime and that they were not themselves otherwise predisposed to engage in that form of criminality. In other words, but for police setting out the bait the crime would not have occurred. Marion Barry’s initial rejection of the bait chosen to catch him caused jurors to feel he was not predisposed. It is less clear why jurors bought the entrapment defense in the narcotics trafficking case of famous auto magnate, John DeLorean. While the government relied on a somewhat shady undercover agent, the jurors generally seemed to feel the government had gone after DeLorean in an unfair way. He was desperate for cash to save his car company in Ireland and it seemed wrong to pick on a guy who had no criminal record. When the jury foreperson was asked the evening the trial concluded, on ABC’s Night-line, why the jury had found DeLorean not guilty, she replied that they felt he had been entrapped by the government. When Ted Koppel asked her what that meant, she struggled for a moment and then acknowledged she was not sure. Fair is fair, evidently. Jurors believed there was no true crime in the behavior of Barry and DeLorean. Precisely because that whiff of government perfidy must be present for the entrapment defense to work, the true crime issue involved is addressed, in a sense, in motion pictures about grifters and con artists. In both Robert Mulligan’s “The Great Impostor” and Steven Spielberg’s “Catch Me If You Can,” we are treated to biographies of true criminals whose exploits are more to be marveled at than scorned. It hardly seems true crime, after all. The lighter side of con artistry is absent from Stephen Frears’ “The Grifters”–“The Sting” this isn’t. Based on a Jim Thompson novel, none of whose bleakness or savagery is sacrificed in behalf of movie audience sensibility or ratings by screenwriter, Donald E. Westlake, “The Grifters” portrays a parallel universe of crime and brutality. But what makes the picture interesting, for our purposes, is the con jobs portrayed, like those which fairly dominate the films of David Mamet (especially “House of Games,” “Homicide,” “The Spanish Prisoner,” “State and Main”), gambits that force us to ask whether we saw what we saw, whether we can trust our own eyes, and to what extent natural or conventional assumptions form part of a larger truth which may not be true at all. In short, context counts. Thus mental disease creates a version of events in the case of a successful insanity defense (the delusion that exculpates) and government creates a version of events in the case of a successful entrapment defense (the trap that exculpates) where in both cases what appears, at least at first, as criminal conduct turns out to fall short of the legal definition of true crime. Impossibility Consider one final example: the impossibility defense. In a Sherlock Holmes matinee movie, Roy William Neill’s “The Woman in Green,” a sniper shoots through an open window from across the street, striking the Baker Street sleuth in the head as he sits innocently in front of a dimly lit curtain. But, as fate would have it, it is only a bust of Julius Cesar that Holmes cleverly placed as a decoy in the rifleman’s line of sight. In one of those classic legal cases with which most first-year law students become acquainted, a battering husband drives his wife through the woods, takes his pistol out of the glove box as she runs from the car for help, catches up with her and pushing her to the ground, repeatedly fires the gun into her head. Immediately arrested by state troopers who observe the event, the violent husband had not counted on one thing: his wife removed the bullets from his gun the night before. A fence is caught receiving stolen goods in violation of the law, only it turns out that the goods were not stolen after all. A vacationer returns home without declaring for customs expensive Irish linen she has hidden in her valise only to discover, to her shock, the very item she prizes is a fake and she is the victim of an unscrupulous operator abroad. In each of these cases, defendants contend there is no true crime. And just as with this defense of impossibility, where defendants seek to persuade judge or jury that in spite of completing all the acts which they intended, no crime actually occurred (no harm, no foul), the law is replete with complex questions of guilt and innocence, intention and consequence, appearance and reality–questions which are not so far removed as might be expected from aesthetic issues (realism and artifice, art vs. life) surrounding definition of the true crime genre. Two kinds of historians have a special interest in true crime. The first group are not interested in the history of crime, per se, but rather rely upon criminal files, police records, and criminal cases as primary source material in their research. In establishing the conduct and mem-bership of radical social groups, for example, (activists, cells, organizations, political parties) who suffer police surveillance or arrest, the records and secret files of official agencies like those of the constabulary or intelligence bureau may not only provide historians with valuable insight but, frequently, hard information which can be found nowhere else. Or criminal cases may be viewed as providing windows upon the central concerns of societies, cultures, or periods of historical development. Edward Muir and Guido Ruggiero’s collection of essays, History from Crime, is but one example of such an approach. The second group are, of course, historians of crime. It is not surprising that one of America’s best known legal historians is also a historian of crime: Lawrence Friedman’s Crime and Punishment in American History, published a decade ago, remains a standard introduction to the subject. Richard Hofstadter’s American Violence: A Documentary History and Edward Thompson’s Whigs and Hunters: The Origin of the Black Act or Albion’s Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth-Century England underline the fact some of the most prominent historians may feel compelled to direct their attention toward national criminal history, certainly if they aspire to tell the full story. Sociologists betray a fondness for crime unparalleled in the social sciences and humanities. From Elliot Liebow’s Tally’s Corner and Edwin Sutherland’s White Collar Crime to contemporary articles in the Journal of Law & Society, crime and criminal organization seem to constitute a kind of rosetta stone for the American sociologist. True crime presents, if not the true face of a society, at least one of the most reliable templates for getting at what makes a society really tick. Now there is journalism and there is journalism. Some of the best true crime writing by journalists is most likely to be found in the bookstore’s non-fiction or contemporary society section. Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist Ron Powers’ book, Tom and Huck Don’t Live Here Anymore, is a perfect example. Powers no doubt came to the attention of many book buyers after doing a Borders Books reading, last year, broadcast nationally by the C-Span cable television network. C-Span likes poetry, quality fiction, children’s literature, award-winning journalism. Powers fit the bill. “After concluding his voluntary testimony,” writes Powers, “Zachary Wilson turned his mildly perplexed gaze up into the faces of the patrolmen who were by now silently grouped around him, staring at him, and told them that he would like his punishment to be death by lethal injection. Zachary’s confession was, in certain unmistakable ways, a Gothic travesty of Mark Twain’s greatest tale.” After summarizing some general characteristics of Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and recounting a key incident from that narrative, Powers adds: “Huck’s great fugitive journey, of course, had been about liberation, and its telling a parable of American venality counterposed against the rough virtue of two figures on a raft. The liberating virtue of Zachary’s and Diane’s flight seemed compromised, at best, by the fact that the blood they left behind was not that of a pig.2 William Randolph Hearst biographer, David Nassau, describes Tom and Huck Don’t Live Here Anymore as “part true-crime murder mystery” and he has a point. This isn’t fiction; it’s all true. And brutal criminality–two senseless killings within a period of just six weeks–is absolutely at the heart of the story Powers has to tell. But still . . . does this book deserve to be categorized as “true crime”? And “deserve” is a telling way to put it since one way of distinguishing Powers’ book from true crime run of the mill is in terms of quality. Powers is simply too good a writer, on this view, to be relegated to the bookstore’s true crime rack. A different, if related, way of drawing this distinction is in terms of author intention and market identification. Describing University of Mississippi English professor Daniel Williams’ Pillars of Salt: An Anthology of Early American Criminal Narratives, his publisher says that “[d]esigned first to terrify readers with examples of divine retribution against lives gone wrong, and later to excite prurient imaginations, criminal narratives comprise a significant . . . genre of American literature.” So instead of dividing true crime writing into journalism versus sensationalism, award-winning versus pedestrian prose, we can divide the genre into virtuous versus prurient, art versus entertainment. Of course both distinctions can be subsumed within the familiar division separating high and low.3 pornography): both are venal exposures of ‘real people’ for profit or entertainment.”5 So even beyond professional distinctions between true crime in law, history, sociology, and journalism, a series of dichotomies can be identified operating in and through crime writing. First, there is an opposition between true and false, perhaps provisionally characterized as the distinction between fact and fiction. Second, within the world of crime in fact, Byrnes cites “two distinct forms. One was the classic hyperbolic approach complete with lurid pictures; the other was more of a just-the-facts journalism done by hard-boiled reporters. If the case was big enough to merit national attention, a more serious work might emerge in book form after the crime was solved . . . .”6 It is easy enough to identify Byrnes’ division here, between two styles or forms of true crime literature, with the difference described above between mainline true crime writing and reporting like that of Ron Powers–the raw and the cooked, so to speak. But Byrnes also identifies a dichotomy within the “classic hyperbolic approach” itself. It is the opposition between attraction and repulsion. True crime dominates news as well as entertainment media, “drawing attention even as it repels sensibilities.” Or as cultural historian Harold Evans puts it: “We are all wildly ambivalent about crime photography. We want to look, and we want to look away.”7 Byrnes argues that these “contradictions capture the very essence of [the] genre.”8 And at least implicitly, he recognizes a contrast between the merely verbal and the appallingly graphic: “lurid depictions of bizarre acts” or crime reportage “complete with lurid pictures” appear to constitute, for Byrnes, the hard core of true crime. The attraction/repulsion duality is one of the key devices employed in the true crime writing of James Ellroy. In “American Tabloid,” for example, one FBI agent (Kemper) forces another, reluctant, FBI agent (Littell) to beat up an informant (Lenny). While the brutality is fierce, the reader wants the informant to talk as badly as either of the FBI agents. The reader simultaneously wants the duress halted and the FBI agent to hit the informant harder.“Hit him, Ward. Hit him or I’ll let Giancana kill him.” Lenny smiled his preposterous pseudo-tough-guy smile.In addition to the violence (beating up an informant with brass knuckles), the bizarre acts (one agent slapping another), and the lurid detail (Lenny’s dental damage), there is also an interesting twist on the realism element of true crime in Ellroy’s later work. Just as Oliver Stone intercut documentary footage with the film he shot depicting the Dallas assassination in his controversial motion picture, JFK, a large chunk of Ellroy’s cast of characters are real historical figures who not only show up in the novels but graciously interact there with the creatures of Ellroy’s imagination. The effect is the same as in JFK: it all seems of a piece, a real piece of history. “In American Tabloid,” writes Richard Schwartz in Nice and Noir, Ellroy “returns to the men in the background who manage to make history [and it] is all very noir, very tabloid, and very conspiratorial (and, likely, very true or at least very plausible).”10 I admit I do not find the concluding portion of Schwartz’s observation convincing–though it would be if offered as description, for example, of the way Don DeLillo inserts the famous and infamous into his novel, Underworld. But no matter, “fact-based” is good enough. The point is that true crime can be understood as a style, a form, a look–perfectly conveyed in the angle on death taken by a crime photographer whose picture, in Shots in the Dark, is reproduced alongside a deadpan commentary: “The killing of small time gangster Carmine Napolitano on Mulberry Street in Manhattan in July 1940 provides big time drama on a hot summer evening.”11 That “true crime” look can be captured with precision by a filmmaker whose narrative is pure fiction. In 1966, according to Tom Byrnes, Truman Capote managed to change the entire true crime genre with a single book: In Cold Blood. “By applying the narrative techniques of the best fiction,” says Byrnes, “with the grim realism of non-fiction reportage, Capote riveted the nation with the twists and turns of his self-named ‘non-fiction novel.’”12 Whether it was called the non-fiction novel or the New Journalism and was practiced by Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal, Ann Rule and Joe McGinness, or lesser lights, it became clear that the true crime genre was flexible enough to include hard-boiled reporting, lurid pulp expose, or literature which liberally mingled fact and fiction. It was the violence, the realism, the attraction/repulsion tension, the lurid detail and grotesque depiction, that made writing true crime. Genuine true crime, the real thing, always delivers more than is bargained for. Caleb Carr’s The Alienist in fiction and Jonathan Demme’s “Silence of the Lambs” in film provide prominent examples of contemporary true crime whose capacity to induce unanticipated, almost unprecedented, mass fear is undeniable (“Jaws” and the shower sequence in “Psycho” are up there too). In Joyce Carol Oates’ What I Lived For, there is a remarkable chapter titled “Down to the Morgue.” City Councilman Corky Corcoran’s visit to the Union City Morgue to get some inside dope on the Marilee Plummer suicide seems harmless enough. Only gradually does Corky realize he has badly underestimated the extent to which a morgue’s ambience can produce unease. “And it’s empty in the morgue now, the attendants have left, just Corky Corcoran and Wolf Wiegler and the corpses amid the rattling ventilators, the promise of more corpses, hidden corpses, in the refrigerated unit to the rear, shelves of corpses, yes but if you can’t see you can’t know. He’s aware too of the tools of Wiegler’s trade close by–hacksaws, scalpels, wicked-looking shears, syringes, what looks like a power drill (for boring into skulls?). His gut’s giving him such pain he’d be doubled over by it except, Wiegler watching, he can’t give in. Can’t.”13 This is still a full page before the Nickson case, the missing baby, and assistant coroner Wolf Wiegler’s decision to cut open the German shepherd. Eventually, thankfully, Corky passes out. There is a similar, though much briefer, narration in Ruth Rendell’s An Unkindness of Ravens, this time at the scene of the crime but with the same, skin-crawling proximity to ghoulish death: “It was emerging relatively clean, soaking wet, darkly stained, giving off the awful reek that was familiar to every man there, the sweetish, fishy, breath- catching, gaseous stench of decomposing flesh. That was what the dog had smelt and liked and wanted more of . . . . The face was pale, stained, bloated, the pale parts the color of a dead fish’s belly. Wexford, not squeamish at all, hardened by the years, decided not to look at the face again until he had to. The big domed forehead, bigger and more domed because the hair had fallen from it, looked like a great mottled stone or lump of fungus.”14 Again, a certain curiosity about death, the attraction/repulsion ambivalence and confusion (this time the dog wants more), the underestimation of impact (Wexford, the veteran, did not faint like Corky Corcoran but even he chose not to look until he had to). Ellroy’s American Tabloid, The Cold Six Thousand, and a third volume in the works, will eventually constitute a trilogy, according to Richard Schwartz, titled “Underworld, U.S.A.” In Nathaniel West’s Day of the Locust, California is where people go to die. In Louis-Ferdinand Celine, it is found on a map, the terminus of a Voyage to the End of the Night. What you find in James Ellroy, however, in Don Delillo and in the cinema of one-time police beat reporter, Samuel Fuller, is the underworld, the big sleep hotel. Fuller made “Underworld, U.S.A,” the “Naked Kiss,” and “Shock Corridor” during the period 1961-64. He used these films, in part, to inject authentic, visceral, deeply unsettling true crime elements into mainstream American cinema. In “Shock Corridor” an ambitious newspaper reporter, desperate to win a Pulitzer Prize, goes underground in the local state mental hospital, getting himself civilly committed so he can solve a murder that took place behind asylum walls. Like Corky Corcoran at the morgue and even Inspector Wexler when those remains are dug up, Fuller’s newsman gets far more than he bargained for. “Fuller was a true auteur,” observes film writer Keith Brown, “whose idiosyncratic ‘tabloid’ or ‘American primitive’ style has become an acknowledged influence on contemporary directors, from Godard and Wenders to Tarantino.” And in “Shock Corridor,” says Brown, “Fuller brilliantly plays upon exterior and interior contrasts” (e.g., the sane and the insane, those outside the institution and those inside, reality and illusion, waking thoughts and dreams) “until his shock corridor finally becomes a microcosm of 1950s America.”15 Criminality, violence, gritty realism, seduction and horror, lurid depiction and psychopathology: in the cinema of Sam Fuller, one finds true crime at its best. |
