Shockproof (1949)

Shockproof is an American thriller film first released in 1949, directed by Douglas Sirk.  The film stars Cornel Wilde, Patricia Knight, John Baragrey, Esther Minciotti and Howard St. John.  Our overall rating for this film is: very good.


Having served a five year stretch in prison for her part in a murder, Jenny Marsh is released into the custody of parole officer Griff Marat, who offers her the prospect of a new life with his support.  One of the conditions of Jenny’s parole is that she no longer sees her former boyfriend, Harry Wesson, a gambler and crook for whom she was willing to go to jail.  Still in love with Wesson, Jenny feels bound to continue seeing him, in spite of Marat’s warnings that she risks going straight back to prison.   Jenny soon finds herself torn between her former lover and Marat, who shows her nothing but kindness and respect.  When Wesson threatens to tell Marat of her promise to escape with him, Jenny shoots him in a moment of madness.  Unable to turn Jenny over to the police, Marat decides to help her escape across the state border.  In doing so, he knows that he himself has become an outlaw.  But it is too late to turn back...

To anyone familiar with Douglas Sirk’s opulent Technicolor melodramas of the 1950s, Shockproof will come as something of a surprise, one of the director’s few excursions into film noir territory.  Although clearly one of Sirk’s lesser works, Shockproof bears its director’s imprint, both in its meticulous direction and also in some of its underlying themes.   One of the essential Sirkian ideas the film explores is the ironic notion that marriage is a bond that has as much to do with guilt as with love; another is the penalty that must be incurred by those who dare to break with societal conventions.

Stylistically, Shockproof resembles most other American films noirs of the late 1940s, but it is not so much a hardboiled thriller as a softboiled melodrama.  The original concept that Sirk was given when he agreed to direct the film was quite different from what actually ended up on the screen.   Written by Samuel Fuller shortly after his return to America after serving in WWII, the original story was much darker, a more conventional film noir which would end in a violent shoot out between the hero, Marat, and the police.   It was not long before the executives at Columbia were struck down with cold feet and drafted in Helen Deutsch to do a rewrite that would make the film more palatable to the average cinemagoer.  Sirk resented this intervention and the control that Deutsch ultimately had over the film, leading him to leave the United States once he had made the film and head back home to Germany.   (He would soon return to Hollywood when he had seen what had become of his country.)

Patricia Knight, a relatively inexperienced actress (and virtually unknown today), was cast as the film’s femme fatale at the insistence of the lead actor Cornel Wilde, her husband.   Knight appeared in just five films and this is unquestionably her finest hour.  She brings an earthy quality that makes her character morally ambiguous, unpredictable and believable, which helps to restore some of the edge to the sanitised screenplay.  Wilde also turns in a fine performance and it is hard not to sympathise with his character’s descent into Hell as he is impelled to give up everything, even his principles, in the name of love.  The use of real locations (necessitated by a low budget) adds to the film’s stark realism and helps distract us from the many plot contrivances.  It is a shame that the film has to end with the conventional happy ending - one that is truly cringeworthy.

© James Travers 2009

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