No sooner has the ink dried on the door of private eye Richard Carlson's new office than he gets a first client in the shapely form of Lucille Bremer, a reporter on the trail of a vanished corrupt judge (Herbert Hayes). Her snooping has led all the way up to the gates of the La Siesta Sanitarium, though to root Hayes out and get her scoop Bremer needs a plant on the inside -- i.e., Carlson, posing as her manic-depressive hubby. Cinephiles like to locate the seeds of Sam Fuller's great Shock Corridor in this shoestring asylum thriller, one of the crack, B-programmers crafted by the pre-Bullfighter and the Lady Budd (still "Oscar") Boetticher. Where Fuller shoots that film's straitjacket fury into the stratosphere, however, Boetticher keeps the plot's inherent hysteria lassoed under a sheen of tonally understated terseness. None of the jazzed-up expressionism of The Snake Pit or the Bellevue sequences from The Lost Weekend for the director -- the occasional outré touch notwithstanding (most notably Ed Wood boulder of flesh Tor Johnson, as the punch-drunk case who nearly rolls the hero over), any lurid hyperbole is crystallized by Boetticher's clarity of purpose and budget-strapped economy of expression. In that sense, the asylum setting, all blank walls, spare props and tense murmurs, is a blueprint for the filmmaker's superb '50s Westerns with Randolph Scott, an abstracting arena of bluff, counter-bluff, sadism, and, maybe, salvation. With Douglas Fowley, Thomas Browne Henry, Ralf Harolde, Gwen Donovan, and Dickie Moore. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce
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