Shock Corridor

Samuel Fuller - 1963
Fuller's basic style here does adopt similar tactics to 'Pickup...'; the track ins, the mixture of short montage from head to head, and longer takes. When these longer one comes on violence, we have a visceral level reached by very few. There are lots of quick, almost imperceptible, yet quite jerky reframings as the combatants really look like they are crashing each other, and themselves, about.
Fuller always does though pay great attention to the look of the film; and his images are terrific. Flagrantly non-realistic uses of shadows, often letterboxing sections of faces, and medium shots to closer views are often made against backdrops almost like a kinf od dynamic portraiture.
The non-realism is also here in a number of flourishes. We have some extremely fast montage work. The non-diagetic inserts of the deteriorating mental state; the woman superimposed on the dreaming man, along with his almost constant voiceover. Those quite stunning, literally, flicks to colour that are clearly not a 'part' of the film, i.e. shot for it, but give the right hallucinatory, non-realist feeling.
Fuller can be at his best though in less direct-attack mode. There is some lovely panning here from medium shot to medium shot, framing a single action or item. And there is one stunning move when a fight breaks out in the canteen; from the wider view of chaos, there is a deeply elegant, but fast-ish, track in to a two-shot as the noise of the fight remains the same.
This is a sensationalised view, funny at times, to its eternal credit it is about something, namely America. Nostalgia for old civil-war values is seen to lead to violence, madness. The reporter out, grubbily, for a story is crazy. We have Reds, Race, and The Bomb, the crazy world lived in, when the American walks down 'The Street' each day.