User Reviews

Shockproof is directed by Douglas Sirk and written by Samuel Fuller and Helen Deutsch. It stars Cornel Wilde, Patricia Knight, John Baragrey and Esther Minciotti. Music is by George Duning and cinematography by Charles Lawton Jr.

When convicted murderess Jenny Marsh (Knight) is released into his care, parole officer Griff Marat (Wilde) literally finds his life being turned upside down...

As many film noir lovers will attest too, there are a number of noir movies out there that frustrate with their endings to the point it induces anger. One such film is Shockproof, a meeting of two great film making minds undone by a studio decision so soapy and irrelevant that studio heads should have rolled post haste.

I'm the one who gets spanked.

Shockproof actually is a great film noir, it takes a simple honest to goodness man, introduces a classic femme fatale into his life, and before you can say "stop you fool", he's in it up to his neck. Stylistically it's top notch noir as well. Sirk and Lawton consistently have bar shadows featuring prominently, Jenny Marsh never escapes them, she may be out of prison but the parole office and latterly Harry Wesson's (Baragrey very good as her no good weasel boyfriend) hotel room consistently imprison her - and actually, Griff as it comes to pass. The Marat home is a delightful amalgamated design of art deco and the ornate. While in Wilde's hands Griff moods and smokes a lot, just as Jenny smolders and dives into his soft melancholic eyes (Wilde really does have sad eyes!).

Excuse me while I push Humpty Dumpty off his wall!

It's all there, for a good hour it's prime film noir, both as a story (the protags join a fine list of noir couples on the lam) and for tech skills as well, but then it all goes pear shaped. Even before you realise that Griff has suddenly abandoned his disabled mother and younger brother without so much as a goodbye, a turn of events leads to a Hollywood type ending (Deutsch brought in for the rewrite) that defies logic, belief, and something that ultimately comes off as insulting. Aaaarggghhh! Sirk and Fuller were disgusted, both wanted Fuller's original ending, and when you look into it, it would have been film noir nirvana and most fitting. A shame unbound for sure, for this is great for the most part as Wilde and Knight have genuine sparks (a real off screen romance) and Sirk, Fuller and Lawton are in sync thematically.

In its fullest form it's a sad 5/10 movie, if turning off 5 minutes before the end and pretending that the couple's fate is unknown - or using our own imaginations and supplanting Fuller's originally scripted finale, then it's a mightily strong piece of film noir.

Released from prison after five years for killing a man to protect her gambling lover (John Baragrey), hard case Patricia Knight comes under the purview of parole officer Cornel Wilde. Trying to keep her from the clutches of the still-infatuated Baragrey, Wilde moves her into his household as companion to his blind, widowed mother. Inevitably they fall in love and wed secretly, since marriage is a violation of parole. Not one to read a Dear John letter lightly, Baragrey attempts to blackmail Knight with old billets-doux but is shot in a struggle. Wilde, on the verge of turning her in, relents, and, in a long sequence that was reprised almost exactly two years later in Tomorrow is Another Day, joins her on the lam, making ends meet as a day-laborer and living in shacks. But the strain of poverty and fear of apprehension begin to corrode....

Douglas Sirk, later to reach fulfilment in lushly overwrought melodramas like Written on the Wind, shows a nice flair for the conventions of noir in this well scripted and acted film, which maintains its integrity until its rabbit-out-of-the-hat ending -- surely not the one penned by co-scenarist Samuel Fuller. (The title, by the way, seems basically meaningless but to have been chosen for its purely abstract, noirish resonance.)

"Shockproof" brought together the disparate talents of two men who were both destined to achieve their greatest successes as directors in the 1950s. Samuel Fuller who wrote the screenplay had previously worked as a newspaper crime reporter and had also written pulp novels. His simple and forceful style used tabloid and pulp influences to produce a script which is full of drive and colour. Douglas Sirk, who directed the movie, was a sophisticated man whose instincts leant more towards the polished style which in later years, characterised the glossy melodramas for which he became famous. Forbidden, inappropriate or doomed love affairs provide powerful material for melodramas and whilst the relationship depicted in "Shockproof" offered Sirk the kind of subject matter which instinctively appealed to him, the extreme and criminal consequences it produced very much suited Fuller's style of writing.

When Jenny Marsh (Patricia Knight) is released from prison, her parole officer Griff Marat (Cornel Wilde) gives her a list of strict conditions which she is required to adhere to in order to avoid being sent back into detention. One of the most important ones (besides not getting married) is that she must stay away from Harry Wesson (John Baragrey), a smarmy gambler who was partly responsible for the events which led to her conviction. Marat is annoyed when, despite being set up with a job and a place to live, she persists in seeing Wesson and is even caught by the police when they raid a bookie's business. As he's convinced of her potential to reform, Griff employs her in his own home looking after his blind mother, an arrangement which he feels will be helpful to give her first hand experience of family life and also keep her away from the attentions of Harry Wesson.

Griff falls in love with his parolee and proposes marriage. She turns him down but when Harry hears about the proposal he puts pressure on Jenny to accept because this would make Griff an accomplice to breaking the terms of her parole. Jenny and Griff get married in secret but one day Harry phones Griff and starts to tell him something about Jenny. Their conversation is suddenly interrupted when a shot is heard. When Griff finds out that Jenny has shot and seriously wounded Harry (and it's uncertain whether he'll survive), the couple go on the run with the intention of escaping to Mexico. The problems they encounter in trying to evade the police eventually become so intolerable that they decide to turn themselves in. When they do however, the events that follow come as a great surprise.

Although Griff is a very conventional and ambitious man with an ideal family life, when he becomes attracted to Jenny, a startling change occurs and a great deal of crazy stuff follows. His intelligence and powers of judgement seem to desert him, otherwise why would he invite a convicted murderer to work in his home and look after his blind mother? Why would he marry her knowing that his complicity in breaking the terms of her parole would damage his reputation and jeopardise his career? His lack of concern about the fact that she attempted to murder Harry is remarkable and it's amazing how readily he goes on the run with her and also how quickly he resorts to criminal action when the need arises. He also seems to suddenly ignore the implications of his actions in terms of how they will impact on his family and his political ambitions.

"Shockproof" provides an account of how powerful passions can derail the lives of even the most conservative and respectable of people but does so in a way which is entertaining, fast paced and competently acted. Unfortunately, a studio imposed ending does detract from the power and the credibility of the story, but this short low budget movie still, nevertheless, remains interesting and well worth seeing.

There are some great lines in the picture but as the story evolves, it makes less and less sense. I guess it's not out of the question that a parole officer could fall for one of his clients, but where the idea falls short is when he abandons his job and scurries cross country with the fatal dame, living on pick up jobs and boosting sandwiches. Stealing a car and heading for Mexico garner bonus points for this couple (Cornel Wilde and Patricia Knight) on the run, but when they're let off the hook by the poor sap and former boyfriend Jenny Marsh (Knight) thought she killed by accident, well that just tore it for me. Earlier in the movie when Jenny tells Griff Marat (Wilde), "Maybe I'm no good, but I do love you", I thought the remark captured what every great noir film aspires to, the flawed femme fatale juggling her affections between the men who covet her. However it's all undone when Marsh's former flame reacts from his hospital bed declaring "I'm enough of a gambler to know when I've lost". At that point, the viewer knows it too.

I decided to take a look at Shockproof in order to hold myself over until I was more prepared to watch something more impressive. Even though the title makes absolutely no sense, I didn't end up finding this movie as uninteresting as I thought it would be, since even though the story is quite generic, it does remind me of a classic movie I always thought highly of. Shockproof begins with a former prison inmate named Jenny (Patricia Knight) being read a set of probation guidelines by her parole officer, Griff Marat (Cornel Wilde). She was arrested in order to take the blame off a gambler named Harry (John Baragrey), whom she was (and still is) in love with. When Harry somehow finds Jenny's new address, Griff gets mad and tells him to get lost: if she talks to him, she'll go back to jail. Harry tells Griff he has no authority over him and can't make him leave, but he does have authority over Jenny instead. Jenny is forced to send Harry away. Shortly after, Jenny starts seeing Harry again at his gambling joint, which is later raided by the cops, and she is picked up. Griff makes a daring decision; he knows he can't stop Harry from ruining his own life if that's what he wants to do, but he won't stand by and let him pull Jenny down with him. He takes Jenny on a ride to his house and assigns her to be the caretaker of his blind mother. Meanwhile, Griff starts to break the rules of his own job and gets romantically attached to Jenny. These advances don't go unnoticed by Harry, who knows parole officers can't fall in love with their clients. He does his best to make sure Jenny returns Griff's affection. After Griff comes home one day and finds Harry in his living room, he beats him and throws him out of the house. Jenny pays one last visit to Harry in order to tell him she was a fool for ever being in love with and covering up for him, but Harry has an ace up his sleeve and grabs hidden letters that Jenny wrote to him saying she loves him. Harry attempts to call the parole board to tell Griff about these letters, so Jenny grabs Harry's gun out of his desk and shoots him. She and Griff then attempt to run away to Mexico, but even there, newspapers plastered with their faces and what they did are all over the place. They keep trying to run and have to come up with fake social security numbers. Eventually they come to a community of workers who live in shacks near oil derricks. At first everything goes well, but after a bunch of newspapers pondering the fate of the "killer couple" arrive, Jenny knows it makes no sense to run anymore. Even with her dyed hair, she will eventually be recognized. She and Griff, the latter throwing away everything his job has given him, give themselves in. As the cops take Griff and Jenny to Harry's hospital room, he says to disregard any comments he made earlier about Jenny's intent to kill him; the shooting was an accident. This was an alright movie. Like I said, the plot isn't really anything to write home about but the last third or so of it bears a resemblance to the Paul Muni classic "I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang." I think this because just like in that movie, a guy gives up his life of being respectable in society so he can seize an opportunity. With every action he takes to keep himself out of custody he makes his problems more severe, and completely buries himself in lies on top of more lies to stay in the shadows. When you lie, you have to stick to what you say or else people will catch onto you, and Griff ends up having to do this. How long can he keep running from the police without being caught? Surely that's no way to live your life. The movie could have ended like Chain Gang too, as Muni's criminal life never comes to an end and he never comes clean. He still has to steal and go unnoticed to survive. Unfortunately, the ending wimped out and had the main characters confess (or at least try to). I felt Patricia's performance to be a bit of a letdown, which isn't surprising as she was in very few other movies, but overall, Shockproof gets a pass from me. I also liked seeing the Bradbury Building, the interior of which is the setting for the Outer Limits episode Demon With a Glass Hand.

"Schockproof" looks like a blueprint for Sirk's works to come ,particularly "Written on the wind" .Patricia Knight is the bad girl (because of a tormented childhood,poverty ,parents loss....) we find again in the 1956 effort:¨besides Knight resembles Dorothy Malone,who,unlike her,will play a rich spoilt kid ,playing around with the gas station men,and driving along a road of derricks (also present in "shockproof") "Shockproof" is too predictable to be considered a Sirk classic (like such works as "written on the wind" "all that heaven allows" "imitation of life" or "a time to love and a time to die" ,to name but four).The script borrows from two Fritz Lang works of the thirties ,one of which is a masterpiece ("You only live twice" ) ;in the other one, much less absorbing "You and me" ,Sylvia Sydney plays a woman in the same situation as Knight.Also handicapped by a happy end ,very artificial.

The best scenes are to be found in the parole officer's house ,when Knight discovers that the other guest is also on parole;this family unit (an old blind mom,two kid brothers) desperately needs someone ,it's obvious.The rebuilding of a family will emerge again in "all that heaven allows" "there's always tomorrow" and particularly "Imitation of life" and "All I desire"

There's a world of difference between Cornel Wilde's previous film, Roadhouse, and this one and it's not entirely due to the casting - Roadhouse boasted a great quartet in Wilde, Richard Widmark, Ida Lupino and Celeste Holm, whereas her we get Wilde, period, and Jean Negulesco handled Roadhouse better than Douglas Sirk handles Shockproof (a meaningless title having nothing to do with the story. Considering they'd been married a good decade there's remarkably little chemistry between Wilde and Patricia Knight or indeed between anyone in the cast and anyone else. The protagonists meet in the first minute, she a parolee, he her parole officer and you can bet the farm he's going to fall for her despite his 'tough' attitude. It's all fairly predictable but Sirk was a decent craftsman and is able to salvage something ... not much, but a little. For Sirk completists only.

This movie is a romance, of a harmonious popular 'classicalness, of which Sirk has been an (acknowledged) craftsman, and who could define the ease, the ineffable charm of the characters and of the storytelling, the deftness, the craft, the zest, art-wise the direct opposite of the noir, being about love, trust, redemption, serene or translucent things (but being, maybe equally, about patronizing, manipulation, lack of respect …, things which Sirk obviously didn't endorse at all and needed to expose here); now, things written about Sirk's movies are often condescending, but unfairly so. The officer and the paroled woman have very good scenes, as when he explains love (what he feels love should be), or when they talk about the invented cousins, initially she seems a decent girl (more than a paroled jailbird), a bland character, then a submissive and very meek woman, being patronized by each of the two guys, allowing each to try dictating her what to think about the other, a rather unlikely behavior, I felt that Sirk cared about this aspect, this domination, he showed its inequity, its wrongness; 'Shockproof' is enormously enjoyable, heartfelt, with gusto, suspenseful when needed, made as a romance, I liked the score, the sets, the awesome cinematography, Sirk's trademark sentimentality (the naivety, the idealization) (meeting Fuller's script, and Wilde's acting)-to use a rather dull word. Marat was shown as a modest everyman, sentimentally inexperienced and mild (his first scenes are different), and politically ambitious (this is told, not shown), with the idea that a political career fits a nice guy's way of life, befits him, so in Sirk's cinema there's also this side of idealization, of delivering the conventional idealizations, but keep also in mind that he subverts the tropes of lying, deceiving, cheating, and he does this magisterially, as with the parolee's story about how she shot the persecutor of her newfound peace, so Sirk handles conventions with ease, for the joy of handling them so well and getting a one might say even lyrical effect, as you can see in the scene with the oilman's newspaper. The parolee was very patronized, each of the two guys wishing to tell her what to think …; this is one of the things I found striking in this movie, the other being the harmonious, exciting, lively form. And from both things one is left with an honest appreciation for Sirk, his craft and world-view.

Remember in "Caged" when Eleanor Parker gets probation but is obviously going to be heading back to prison? That "after prison" story is pretty much what befalls parolee Patricia Knight in this engrossing film noir about a paroled murderess who falls in love with her parole officer (Cornel Wilde) and unintentionally leads him down the path towards his possible own doom. At first, it is business only, but as nature takes its course, sparks fly and Wilde falls under her spell. It is obvious that she longs to reform, but circumstances and the shady characters from her past cause situations to explode beyond her control, and leads to violence which sends Knight and Wilde on the run into hiding.

There's a slight bit of family drama concerning Wilde's blind mother (Esther Minicotti, best remembered as the manipulative mother in "Marty") who is totally sympathetic here. The glamorous Knight has an uncanny resemblance to such film noir vets as Lauren Bacall, Veronica Lake, Lizabeth Scott, and in particularly the more obscure K.T. Stevens. See the same year's "Port of New York" to see what I mean in referring to Ms. Stevens. Ironically, even though I'd never heard of Ms. Knight, I found her to be quite good. The last reel was pretty much re-done by Warner Brothers two years later for a film noir called "Tomorrow is Another Day". This is probably the only non-soap opera of director Douglas Sirk's career, and one of his few away from Universal. If you can get past the implausibility of parole officer Wilde risking his career (which includes political ambitions) for a murderess like Knight, then you will actually find yourself enjoying this movie as much as I did.

I chose to watch this film because it was written by Sam Fuller--and Fuller was a freakin' genius at making exceptional small-budget films. However, as you'll notice from the IMDb trivia that Fuller's original tough-as-nails ending was changed--and a cheap clichéd ending was added. And, after watching it, I would agree that the ending was terrible--but what occurred before that wasn't a whole lot better.

The film begins with a lady getting paroled. She'd murdered someone and her parole officer (Cornell Wilde) insists she cannot see her old boyfriend as a condition of parole. However, the next day she's caught with him. Instead of violating her parole, he instead treats her very, very strangely. Like a total sap, he brings her and another parolee home to meet his family and have dinner with them! Soon, he hires her to look after his blind mother--and she's practically part of the family.

You wonder if any officer could ever have been that stupid or have such poor personal boundaries! You assume that any parole officer behaving like he does during the film would be immediately fired! Throughout much of the film, it's obvious she's playing her parole officer and secretly meets with the old boyfriend. Eventually, however, it's uncertain--could she be falling in love with Wilde? You sure as heck know he's falling for her! This is a film where you very seriously have to suspend your sense of disbelief--otherwise the plot simply won't make any sense. After all, Wilde's character is absolutely unbelievable...and as the film progresses, he gets worse and worse! As for me, I wasn't able to suspend my belief THIS much! I am not sure how much of this was due to Fuller and how much was due to studio meddling, but it was a problematic script from the outset. It MIGHT have worked if Wilde had played a dishonest p.o. from the outset--not the super-officer he was supposed to be. The one redeeming value the film has is the great dialog--very gritty and enjoyable for fans of film noir (except for the inexplicable line about 'getting a crook' and moving to California). But the story just didn't make any sense and it clearly could have used a re-write or just an entirely new plot--and an ending that is believable. The story could have worked, but instead of tense film noir it sometimes closer resembled "Dumb and Dumber"! Could a supposedly smart man act dumb over a 'dame'? Sure--but the film just didn't sell the idea well at all.