Friday, March 25, 2011

Any resemblance to Nurse Ratched is purely coincidental

That's because the movie Shock Treatment, which is airing tomorrow afternoon at 2:30 PM ET on the Fox Movie Channel, came out a decade before One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

The movie starts off with gardener Martin Ashley (Roddy McDowall) working for his elderly female boss, and then all of a sudden taking his shears to his boss and killing her! Cut to the trial, where the defense is claiming insanity, based on the fact that the victim had a million dollars in cash that was supposedly burned by Martin: who would do a thing like that? Dr. Manning (Judson Laire) thinks Martin isn't insane, while Dr. Beighley (Lauren Bacall) takes the other side and carries the day, getting Martin committed for 90 days to the state mental asylum which she runs. Dr. Manning things Dr. Beighley is lying, and has a nefarious plan to prove it. He hires Dale, an actor (played by Stuart Whitman), and offers Dale a cool $10,000 for the best acting job of his life: find out what happened to the money, which will involve playing insane and getting committed to the mental hospital. Dale takes up the challenge, and is soon trying to make nice to Martin.

Dr. Beighley will have none of this, however. She doesn't trust her new patient, thinking Dale is faking insanity. Meanwhile, we find that she could have used that million bucks that Martin apparently burned. Beighley is doing experiments that show how brilliant she is, but can't let on that she's doing them because mere normal people would find them cruel; the experiments can't be performed on humans, anyhow, since no sane human would agree to be a subject in her experiment. But if an anonymous donor could give her a million.... It's these experiments, and the mistrust of Dale, that begin to give one the impression that Dr. Beighley is not unlike Nurse Ratched.

Things take a sudden twist when our hero tries to eavesdrop on one of Dr. Beighley's hypnosis sessions with Martin. She's trying to get Martin to reveal the truth about the money, and when she discovers that Dale is listening in, she puts two and two together and figures that Dale has been sent by Manning. And here, the movie takes a rather sudden and sharp turn, leading to an ending you might be able to guess, but is still fun anyhow.

Lauren Bacall and Roddy McDowall both supposedly didn't particularly care much for Shock Treatment. And to be honest, the movie is more entertaining than good. The characters aren't all that believable, the way that mental hospitals are presented is ludicrous, and there are extraneous characters who serve no real purpose, particularly a patient played by Carol Lynley. But it certainly is entertaining; it's the sort of movie you can enjoy on a rainy day with a bowl of popcorn and some friends nearby.

Unfortunately, the movie hasn't been released to DVD, and when the Fox Movie Channel last showed it, it was a panned-and-scanned print, except for the credits, which were on the Cinemascope Diet: everything was simply squeezed to fit a 4x3 screen, making things seem much thinner than they actually are.

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