The script that would become “Shockproof,” was originally called “The Lovers,” and was, Fuller said in a late ’60s interview, “about a woman who, in order to get her lover back, marries someone else.” An independent producer bought “The Lovers” and brought it to Columbia, where Sirk, then under contract to the studio, accepted the assignment of directing it. Studio executives listened respectfully as Fuller pitched films with titles like “Murder: How to Get Away With It,” and “Crime Pays.” But Fuller’s back-alley reality was judged too real for the public’s fragile morals, and Fuller was shown the door all over Hollywood. In his marvelously emphatic and colloquial memoir “A Third Face,” New York-born copyboy-turned-screenwriter-turned World War II infantry dogface Sam Fuller described the postwar search for work in Hollywood that would lead to his “Shockproof” credit.įuller’s prodigious combat experience drove him to pitch scripts with the punch-to-the gut truth of his pre-war years covering the NYC waterfront and his soul-shattering walk across Europe with the 1st Infantry Division. When Griff takes Jenny home to meet his mother, Jenny’s crazy love for Harry begins to fade. What Griff doesn’t know is that Jenny’s underworld boyfriend, Harry Wesson (John Baragrey), isn’t as far out of the picture as Jenny claims. Though aware that fraternization is verboten, two-fisted but bighearted parole officer Griff Marat (Cornel Wilde) falls hard for gorgeous murder parolee Jenny Marsh (Wilde’s then real-life wife Patricia Knight). “Shockproof,” director Douglas Sirk’s 1949 masterpiece, originated in the typewriter of Samuel Fuller, and is the sole rung shared by two revered cinema originals on their otherwise unrelated climb up the a ladder to commercial success in the 1950s.Ĭornily, sincerely, and briskly zipping along for 80 minutes on the wings of Fuller’s tabloid storytelling verve (unmistakably evident despite meddlesome studio interference) and kept buffed to showroom-quality smoothness by Sirk’s elegant camera style and compositional genius, “Shockproof” is a minor film vehicle with major virtues.
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