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.
Review of Shockproof
