Shockproof (Columbia, 1948, released 1949)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After that TCM’s next feature was a 1949 film noir called Shockproof, directed by Douglas Sirk from a script originally written by the great Samuel Fuller called The Lovers but, alas, rewritten terribly by producer Helen Deutsch, who systematically stripped the story of just about everything Sirk had found interesting about it and made him want to make it. Sirk was a German expat who’d been a major theatrical director under the Weimar Republic and under normal circumstances would have been one of the first people to flee when the Nazis took over. Only when the Nazis took over he was working on a major theatrical production of Kurt Weill’s last German work, Der Silbersee (“The Silver Lake”), with book by Georg Kaiser, a bitter satire of capitalism in general and the oil business in particular. He was doing it in Leipzig, where the city’s mayor, Kurt Gördeler, was protecting him from the Nazis; later Gördeler would turn up as the would-be assassins of Hitler in 1944 were planning to install as Germany’s new ruler once they knocked off Der Führer – only Hitler survived the attempt on his life and Gördeler was one of the people captured, tortured and slowly executed on Hitler’s orders. Sirk – under his original German name, Detlef Sierck – managed to keep his career going in the German film industry because the largest German studio, UFA, was headed by Alfred Hugenberg, a Right-winger but not a Nazi. Sirk made a series of German films over the next four years, including a huge hit called Schlussakkord (“Final Chord”) in 1936 and two films with Hitler’s favorite singing star, Zarah Leander, Zu Neuen Ufern (“To New Shores”) and La Habañera, both in 1937. I’ve seen La Habañera and it’s an amazing film with striking similarities to Sirk’s later American film Written on the Wind (1956), a convincing refutation to the myth that Germany stopped making decent movies when Hitler took over and didn’t start again until the emergence of Fassbinder, Wenders, Herzog, Schlondörff and other young directors in the early 1970’s. Sirk then fled to the Netherlands when Joseph Goebbels took personal control of UFA in early 1938 and ended up in the U.S. two years later, where his hopes of becoming a director at the San Francisco Opera were stymied by America’s entry into the war.

Sirk signed a contract to direct films for Harry Cohn at Columbia Pictures, but Cohn spent the next five years loaning Sirk out to various independent producers – including Seymour Nebenzal, who had been production chief at Nero Studios during the late Weimar years – for whom he made interesting, quirky productions like Hitler’s Madman, Summer Storm, A Scandal in Paris, Lured (a great film noir in which he got a brilliant dramatic performance out of Lucille Ball), and Sleep No More (a rather sorry Gaslight knockoff with Claudette Colbert and Don Ameche, produced by silent-screen veteran Mary Pickford). Then Cohn decided to have Sirk make films at Columbia, and for his first project there he gave Sirk Slightly French, a rather pathetic remake of a 1933 screwball comedy/musical called Let’s Fall in Love in which a U.S. movie star has to pretend to be French to promote her career. (In the original version she had to pretend to be Norwegian.) Then Cohn gave him Samuel Fuller’s The Lovers, a vehicle for Cornel Wilde in which he plays Griffin “Griff” Marat, a parole officer who falls in love with the hardened woman criminal, Jenny Marsh (Patricia Knight, then Mrs. Cornel Wilde; she had bought her way out of a 20th Century-Fox contract so they could make films together, though this was the only one they did before they divorced in 1951), he’s assigned to supervise. The main problem is that Jenny already has a boyfriend, Harry Wesson (a marvelously oily performance by John Baragrey), and though Griff has named him as one of the potential bad influences she’s not allowed to see on pain of losing her parole, Harry is able to trace her to the rooming house where Griff got her a room. Eventually Griff ends up hiring her himself as caregiver to his blind mother (Esther Minciotti in her film debut) and letting her stay in their house.

Proximity works its predictable magic and Griff and Jenny fall in love with each other, though they can’t get married because one of the conditions of her parole is she must not marry until her parole is finished. Harry wants Jenny to marry Griff so she can denounce him and get out from under his thumb, but Jenny goes through with the marriage because she’s genuinely in love with Griff even though they know they have to keep the marriage a secret. But Harry exposes them anyway and, in order to stop him from calling the police on them, Jenny shoots and presumably kills Harry. Griff and Jenny are forced to become fugitives – and the best parts of the movie are the ones in which the two are attempting to live outside the law and Griff is so tenaciously honest about it he literally has no idea how to be a fugitive. Their flight takes them into Mexico, where Griff bluffs his way into a job as an oil worker, but they’re threatened by a series of news articles in tabloid papers (essentially the 1949 versions of America’s Most Wanted) that keeps exposing them. In Fuller’s original ending, there was to have been a shoot-out with the cops in which Griff would have died, but the ending Deutsch foisted on Sirk showed Harry merely wounded, not killed, by Jenny’s shot. Griff and Jenny come back to the U.S. to give themselves up, and Harry gallantly blesses their union, while the authorities refuse to violate her because she was in the company of her parole officer all the time. Shockproof is an example of a potentially great film weakened, if not entirely ruined, by studio and producer interference, and as I wrote the first time I saw it in 2008 (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2008/10/shockproof-columbia-1948-rel-1949.html), it also doesn’t help that Cornel Wilde turns in such a gruff, one-dimensional performance and a true film noir actor like Bogart, Dick Powell, Mitchum or Ladd might have brought more dimension to the role. It also doesn’t help that in 1951 producer Sam Spiegel, director Joseph Losey and writers Robert Thoeren, Hans Wilhelm, Hugo Butler and an uncredited Dalton Trumbo made a film noir classic called The Prowler, which was everything Shockproof could have been and wasn’t: a tough, no-nonsense, uncompromised drama about a cop corrupted by a femme fatale and ultimately meeting his doom and getting killed as a fugitive from justice.