Most critics take to Shock Corridor for the same reason: Fuller’s direction. The reviews describe the film as forceful, unrelenting and furiously energetic, and the praise clusters around its look, the stark black-and-white photography, the corridor’s hard lines, and the hallucinatory sequences in which the reporter’s mind gives way. Several treat those freak-outs as the point, reading the asylum as a picture of the social madness of its era, and one suggests it as a good place to start with Fuller.
The reservations are widely shared but mostly forgiven. Nearly everyone concedes that the premise asks for a good deal of disbelief, that the plot does not hold together, that the sets are cheap and the dialogue often ludicrous; most decide the energy carries it. The one firm dissent comes from Variety, writing on release, which finds the social commentary swamped by sensationalism and the direction heavy-handed. The spread is narrow apart from that, running from good to very good.