Blind love
By Michael J. Roberts
'This is the dialectic -t here is a very short distance between high art and trash, and trash that contains an element of craziness is by this very quality nearer to art.' ~ Douglas Sirk
Douglas Sirk had a nice line on the nuances of sexual politics between men and women in post war America and often turned his probing European eye to love and lust in that buttoned up, puritanical country. Shockproof is his 1949 entry, often categorised as a Film Noir but better thought of as Noir-adjacent, as the Femme Fatale proves not very fatal and the sucker she plays ends up redeeming her. Shockproof is typical Sirk melodrama with the added kick of having a Samuel Fuller screenplay (yes, THAT Sam Fuller) - a more surprising pairing in American cinema may be found, but I doubt it. The film also has a husband-and-wife team playing the leads in Cornel Wilde and Patricia Knight, who are matched every step of the way by character actor John Baragrey as the villain of the piece.
Jenny Marsh (Patricia Knight) is released on parole and must report to her parole officer Griff Marat (Cornel Wilde) every day under strict conditions – one of which is an embargo on getting married. Marat lays out the restrictions that also involve her avoiding her shady friends like Harry Wesson (John Baragrey) - the man who she took the prison rap for over killing a man. Jenny can’t help herself in secretly seeing Wesson and when Griff finds out she is in danger of being sent back to prison. Griff, who is falling for Jenny, employs her instead to look after his blind mother (Ester Minciotti), hoping that she will embrace a more normal life and leave Wesson behind once and for all.
Sirk became famous for smuggling certain subversive ideas into mainstream American films, and Shockproof may be an early example. Fuller on the other hand seemed duty bound to blow up American cinema from the inside. Sirk knew the power of sex in film and how it worked upon the imagination of a quietly salacious section of Main Street USA and tapped into this in many of his subsequent efforts. Like Hitchcock who delighted in pimping out Ingrid Bergman in Notorious – where the agent (Cary Grant) who secretly loved her assigned her to marry the villain (Claude Rains), knowing that it meant full well she’d be having sex with him – here we have Wesson urging Jenny to marry lovestruck Griff to compromise his power over her, and he doesn’t think twice that she’ll have to perform ‘wifely’ duties for Griff into the bargain. Sex as a weapon – very Noir indeed.
And like Hitchcock in Shadow of a Doubt, Sirk brings a scent of danger into a mainstream, if idealised home in the form of the murderess caring for Griff’s blind mother. The household is also completed by Griff’s younger, school age brother Tommy, who adds to the straightlaced nature of the home in stark contrast to the world Jenny has come from. Jenny is hard edged and wants her bad boy to begin with, but she softens as Griff tries to dull the sharp edges. Sirk and Fuller hint at the sexuality and carnal needs of Jenny and allude to her sexual relationship with Wesson, which is obviously conducted out of wedlock and scandalous for the era and Patricia Knight is very effective in showing the barely repressed lust she still has for Wesson. Is Griff attracted to the dark side or fooling himself that Jenny has better angels that are worth bringing out, or will she corrupt him in the process? These are the questions Sirk and Fuller pursue, even if the studio ending doesn’t follow Fuller or Sirk’s wishes but is no surprise for a studio film of the time.
Cornel Wilde was a big star, inexplicably in my opinion as his limitations are never far from the surface but he’s fine here as the good-hearted guy, and Patricia Knight is very effective as the conflicted Jenny as she transitions from swooning bad boy’s squeeze to caring wife. The acting honours, however, belong to John Baragrey as the odious Wesson – Baragrey was a journeyman actor who made few films and quite a lot of television in the 1950s but here he is pitch perfect as the slimy ne’er-do-well who is happy to pimp Jenny to Griff for his own advantage. It is never spelled out as to how Jenny killed a man for Wesson but his hold on her is established from the start and invests that part of the story with real bite and tension. Sirk doesn’t dwell on the fact that Griff abandons his family for the allure of the woman (now credibly accused of a second shooting) at the drop of a hat to go on the run with Jenny and their scenes as struggling man and wife are beautifully rendered.
Shockproof is minor Noir but interesting for fans of Sirk and Fuller. It anticipates some of the repressed sexuality of Sirk’s masterful The Tarnished Angels and doesn’t have the rawness of a Fuller film – Fuller wanted to show the hypocrisy of a system that would keep a couple from marrying, but the botched ending always sullied his view of the project. The cinematography is solid from Charles Lawton Jnr. - who had shot the Noir exemplar The Lady from Shanghai for Orson Welles and the score is also well realised from studio composer George Duning. Douglas Sirk was never afraid to challenge the sexual mores of mainstream America or tease at its dark underbelly and would go on to make infinitely better films than Shockproof, but it remains a fascinating curio from a master smuggler.
