Shock Treatment (1964) User Reviews

A Forgotten Gem

[terenceallen · 8/10 · 9 September 2004]

This movie is one of those that's great to watch in the dark with popcorn, on a rainy night, or come to think of it, pretty much anytime. The actors are great, and the mood is very intense. Whitman was early in his career, McDowell does his usual stellar work, and Lauren Bacall gives one of her best performances as someone who belongs in the asylum, not running it. This is a great old flick that deserves a lot more recognition that it gets. If you watch it, and like it, tell others about it so the word can be spread. This deserves to be released on DVD if it hasn't already, and should be mentioned with the other great Hollywood thrillers.

Suspenseful, disturbing--with really nasty villain

[Rovin · 8/10 · 11 March 2000]

This film had some intense moments. Stuart Whitman is sent into a mental institution to pretend he is insane in order to spy on inmate Roddy Macdowell and find out where he might have hidden $1 million. Lauren Bacall plays the doctor/research scientist who is very much interested in the money as well.

With her own animal torture lab(in California and Africa!), and grumbling that she cant perform dangerous experiments the way she'd like to...we get a picture early on that she isnt Florence Nightingale! There are a couple of scenes that were as disturbing as comparable moments from One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and the Marathon Man.

Although i found the film decent enough--with fine performances from the leads, and a good ending, it did seem a bit rushed in places, and some supporting characters either had unwarranted emphasis(Carol Lynley) or too little(Ossie Davis, Bert Freed). The rest of the patients seemed to be borrowed from "the Snake Pit."

As a 1960's suspense flick it wasnt bad, but this would be a great contender for a remake.

A Real Find

[Handlinghandel · 7/10 · 26 September 2005]

Stuart Whitman is seen in a classical acting role and recruited to play a very rough part: He is to be paid for feigning insanity and being committed to psychiatric hospital. The goal is to learn more about a character played by Roddy McDowell, who is confined there.

Whitman is excellent, as is McDowell. The latter develops a bit of an unstated crush on the former. So does Carol Lynley, who has a very small role for the major billing she gets.

The plot revolves around psychiatrist and researcher Lauren Bacall. This character could give Dr. Caligari a run for his money.

It's not hough art but i's exciting and suspenseful. And the acting is excellent all around.

Whitman samples the nuts.

[Poseidon-3 · 20 October 2004]

A sort of cousin to Samuel Fuller's "Shock Corridor" (a slightly earlier and far more inventive film), this mental ward drama concerns an actor who feigns illness in order to enter a state asylum and discover the whereabouts of one million dollars. McDowall plays a rose-obsessed gardener who snips the head off of his employer and is committed to the state mental hospital (hilariously, he gets 90 days for his crime and then is to be released!) When it is discovered that McDowall may have hidden away a million bucks of his employer's money, Laire hires Whitman to play nutty and enter the same hospital as McDowall in order to find out where it is. Bacall plays a doctor who helped get McDowall off on an insanity plea in the first place and who may be after the money herself. Lynley is a manic-depressive girl who catches Whitman's eye. Before long Whitman finds that it's easier to get into a mental hospital than it is to get out (though getting out doesn't present TOO great a challenge to him either!) The film has a nice assortment of familiar actors in it and a decent score by Jerry Goldsmith, but it's never as interesting or surprising as one might like it to be. Whitman was rarely a deep or particularly detailed actor and his work here is adequate, but unexceptional. McDowall is properly off-center and does a fine job, but isn't really used much. Faring worse is Lynley, whose character is sketchy at best and whose screen time is both limited and mostly unimportant. (Sadly, these two future "The Poseidon Adventure" co-stars share no screen time here.) Bacall does fine as the haughty, embittered doctor overseeing all the cuckoos, but by the end her character and the film's plot line have gone way off the deep end. The ending is preposterous in the extreme. The whole movie suffers from unbelievability, though. It doesn't help matters that the hospital seems more like a retreat or a club than a medical facility. The patients (even newly admitted murderers and other troublemakers) have free reign to do as they please with little supervision and get to smoke anytime they wish, go to dances and just generally hang out and have a good time! To say that the attention paid to mental illness and its cures is superficial is an understatement. This makes "The Caretakers" look like a deep exposé on the subject. Still, it's a fairly brief, occasionally intriguing movie with an interesting enough hook to warrant a look.

Lunatics take over the asylum

[blanche-2 · 6/10 · 22 October 2005]

Stuart Whitman is a money-hungry actor who is hired to fake insanity in order to find $1 million in "Shock Treatment." The film also stars Lauren Bacall, Roddy McDowell, Carol Lynley, and Ossie Davis. When asked about this film, Lauren Bacall commented, "You have no idea what Roddy and I went through making that movie." I don't, and frankly, it's a little hard to tell what the problems were from the filming. It seemed pretty straightforward. She plays a doctor who would have found a good home on Josef Mengele's staff. McDowell is a patient in the asylum who killed his wealthy boss and then supposedly burned her money. No one believes that, and Whitman is hired to find out where he hid it.

It turns out, he's not the only one interested, and things become pretty dangerous for him. The movie seems to meander along, and then becomes rather exciting toward the end. It was directed and filmed in an uninteresting way, so it's not as good as it could have been.

The Mad Gardener

[sol-kay · 7/10 · 2 June 2010]

***SPOILERS*** It's when his boss the eccentric and wealthy Mrs. Amelia Townsend, Betrice Grenough, started messing with his beloved plants that her Gardner all around handy man, as well as chauffeur, the not so stable Martin Ashley, Roddy McDowell, ended up decapitating her with a pair of garden shears. Turning himself into the police and not defending his murderous action Ashley is later declared insane and sent to a mental institution until he's deemed to be normal by a battery of court appointed psychiatrists.

It's the late Mrs. Townsend's good friend millionaire Harley Manning, Judson Laire, who smelled a rat in her murderer Martin Ashley getting off so easy and that rat was non other then Ashley's court appointed psychologist Dr. Edwina Beighley, Lauren Bacall. It was Dr. Beighley's testimony on Ashley's behalf that save him, by Ashley being committed into Dr. Beighley's mental institution, from either the San Quentin gas chamber or a life sentence behind bars. Feeling that there's something more to Dr. Beighley's concern in keeping Ashley in her mental institution then just curing him! Manning gives $10,000.00 to struggling actor Dale Nelson, Stuart Whitman, so he could fake his way, by acting crazy, into Dr. Beighley's "funny farm" as well as learning all about plants and flowers in order to get close to the flower and plant lover Martin Ashley! And thus find out what kind of relationship he had with Dr. Beighley in order for her to be so good to him! And as Nelson was soon to find out it had nothing to do with romance. It did in fact have a lot to do with the late Mrs. Townsend's missing million dollars!

Much like the Samuel Fuller 1963 classic "Shock Corridor" the film "Shock Treatment" has to do with a man going undercover in a mental institution to get to the truth about a crime that was committed by one of its inmates. And at the same time almost ending up losing his mind in doing so! Nelson tries to get close to Ashley by claiming to be a "flower child" like himself but Ashley instinctively knows that he's only putting him on and refuses to play along with him. It's in fact the very shrewd and manipulative Dr. Beighley who finally gets Ashley to open up, with him spending 31 hours on the coach being psychoanalyzed by her, and tell her what she so desperately want's to know. Where Mrs. Townsend's million is!

***SPOILERS*** Nelson is later found out by Dr. Beighley to have been "planted" in her mental institution by her sworn enemy Haley Manning who's out to have her license revoked for unethical and unprofessional conduct. Being put under shock treatment and psychotic drugs Nelson somehow is able to escape from Dr. Beighley institution only to find out that the very person who can prove his innocence in being normal, not psychotic, Haley Manning had just died! This sets the audience up for the shocking surprise at the end of the film in where the buried million, dug up by both Ashley & Dr.Beighley, was hidden! Yes it was there all right just like Ashley said it would be but the condition that it was in was quite another matter!

Good in parts

[JohnHowardReid · 6/10 · 11 September 2014]

Despite the almost universal thumbs-down on this movie from professional critics, I think that thriller fans will find it reasonably entertaining. Admittedly, the movie has faults, but I don't blame the script so much as the direction. True, the plot strands and twists are very familiar. Indeed, "hackneyed" might be a better term. And some of the dialog doesn't ring true. But all told, I think Boehm has penned a reasonably exciting and suspenseful script, peopled with reasonably interesting characters and moving at a fairly fast pace. Unfortunately, the script's effectiveness has been whittled down by slack and inefficient direction. Worse still, the version I saw was at times almost impossible to follow due to jump cuts and lack of continuity. And where it is not glaringly inept, the direction is at best routine. Lauren Bacall has a role in which she would seem to be ideally cast, but she muffs it and is content to walk though the film just reciting her lines. Her close-ups are a disaster. She looks haggard. Whitman plays the hero with his customary competence, but the real acting high points are left to Roddy McDowall. Ossie Davis is also a stand-out. Carol Lynley is effective in a typical role.

A Most Pleasant Verification

[EdgarST · 8/10 · 2 December 2016]

If you ever have a hunch that a movie you saw in your youth was good, give your memory the benefit of the doubt, because you may be surprised once or twice: now, 52 years after its release in cinemas, I have bought a copy of "Shock Treatment" that was made in Germany (with Spanish subtitles!) with above average quality, and I found out how good it is. No wonder I had not forgotten this movie, even if I could not remember the plot. It is definitely not a serious drama, for it mixes a touch of camp and humor in a story that borders on horror and science-fiction, played with gusto by everybody, especially Lauren Bacall as a wicked psychiatrist. On the other hand, if you approach it as a straight psychological drama, you will find that scriptwriter Sydney Boehm was quite sincere and treated the "psychic elements" of the story with all the respect you could expect in 1964, to add as much realism and credibility as he could to such a wacky tale. Everybody in the cast seems to be having a field day: Stuart Whitman was in his best years doing his usual hunk hero number, Roddy McDowall was quite effective as a psycho killer with loads of homoerotic sensibility, Carol Lynley has more than enough screen time to portray a troubled girl whose natural sensuality was repressed by her mother, and Bacall is wonderfully mean as the highly unethical head of a mental hospital. Director Denis Sanders had a very curious career: he did everything, from bee girls' horror to documentaries about Elvis Presley and soul music, and the compelling war drama "War Hunt" with John Saxon as a schizophrenic soldier, plus two works that have been declared National Film Registry by the US Congress: the moving Civil War short "A Time Out of War" and the documentary "Czechoslovakia 1968". Here he is also in good shape, effectively handling the story and immensely helped by Sam Leavitt's beautiful black & white / wide-screen cinematography. Jerry Goldsmith, who had worked in "Freud" in 1962, composed here another good score for "mental matters". In fact, 1964 was an excellent year for Goldsmith, who also wrote great dramatic music for "Rio Conchos" and "Fate Is the Hunter". If you do not sit waiting for a masterpiece, turn off the lights, ignore your cell phone and take it as fun, as a tale of greed and nutty plans, with fantasy solutions played by good actors, and you will probably enjoy "Shock Treatment" as much as I did.

Bacall's Dr. Beighley preceding Nurse Ratched by several years...

[moonspinner55 · 4/10 · 26 June 2006]

Mental shenanigans involving out-of-work actor (Stuart Whitman), so desperate for money he'll accept any insane proposition lobbied his way, masquerading as a new patient at an asylum. He's hoping to get crucial information out of another patient (Roddy McDowall) on the whereabouts of some hidden loot, but unfortunately runs afoul of doctor Lauren Bacall (doing a Nurse Ratched years before her time). Delirious, over-the-top melodrama that's actually a hoot if watched in the requisite silly spirit. Whitman keeps a straight face throughout and actually wins the viewer over, but McDowall is just awful and Carol Lynley is hilariously mercurial as an inmate with glossy, shampooed hair. This show rightfully belongs to Bacall, pulling off an extreme role with her usual rigid-jaw aplomb. ** from ****

Hilariously BAD

[mls4182 · 10/10 · 21 March 2021]

This film is pure camp. It was part of a slew of early 60s nuthouse exploitation films. It tries to be racy which makes it even more hilarious.

Great idea, Great Bacall, Mediocre execution

[jaxla · 4/10 · 15 May 2005]

SHOCK TREATMENT has a delicious hook: an actor is hired to impersonate a lunatic so he can be put in an institution and become friends with a lunatic killer who just happens to know where a lot of money is hidden. Of course, there are all sorts of complications, primarily head psychiatrist Lauren Bacall, who also has her eye on the money and figures out the actor's game. Not a bad set up, but the script is full of holes and lame dialogue and the direction is lackluster. But Bacall, as a precursor to Nurse Ratched, is a hoot as the villain and gets to administer shock treatment to the actor (Stuart Whitman) to try to break him! The ending isn't bad either, a couple of reversals and a nice battle with a pitch fork. This is one to watch with one eye closed on a rainy afternoon, which is just about how I caught in on Fox Movie Channel. In her autobiography, Bacall refers to the film as "truly tacky." She's right on target, both in her performance and her critique!

Shock treatment

[searchanddestroy-1 · 8/10 · 7 May 2020]

Funny that I watched SHOCK CORRIDOR last week and read ONE FLEW OVER A COCKOO NEST again two days ago. I did not foresee this program. The two best stories ever about mental institutions; but I am sure there are some more, unknown, from Eastern Europe countries for instance. Anyway, this film starring Stu Whitman and Lauren Bacall, is very good too. Bacall is excellent in this role of the evil woman, she is effective at one hundred percent, but her character - AND NOT HER PERFORMANCE - is not as powerful as Louise Fletcher's one in Milos Forman's masterpiece. The role of the female master, the Devil's sidekick in charge of the lead actor and the mental institution. Yes, this film, though not being on the same scale of the other two is worth watching, even less depressing and gloomy too. I don't know if it was released in France. Not sure. You can prefer THE SNAKE PIT, from director Anatole Litvak, psychiatric institutions shown from another angle.

Valley of the Shrinks.

[mark.waltz · 5/10 · 16 November 2022]

This is a delightfully unintentionally funny melodrama with an over-the-top Lauren Bacall obviously not holding back, and playing the heads psychiatrist at a mental institution who to put it mildly has a lot of problems and more than a few agendas. With Stuart Whitman, Roddy McDowell and Carol Lynley, I'm surprised there was any scenery by the end of the film left. This film has some really shocking moments that had me dropping my jaw one second and laughing hysterically at the next. It's a deliciously fun bad movie that is a bit tacky in the melodramatic way it deals with its subject matter, and Bacall's character is definitely not doing the psychiatic profession any favors with the way she is written. It's easy to see why Bacall found this to be one of her worst movies.

The problem with the film as a whole is that it often starts dealing with one subject that is completely forgotten as the film moves on. A group of patients are on a bus on their way to the hospital and a beautiful black lady stands up and begins to perform a striptease, stopped by the matron who simply explains that she won't be making any money because it's not officially showtime. The movie reminds me of "The Caretakers" which starred Joan Crawford the year before, but where that film has a few camp moments, they are not as outrageous as this one. It is a film that has to be seen to be believed and an ending that is both jaw-dropping and shocking.

Professional lunatics at their best

[clanciai · 10/10 · 7 July 2023]

This is a very unusual role for Stuart Whitman, who was more at home as cowboys, western heroes and partners with John Wayne, but here he has for once a very interesting role, as an actor who is paid to act a lunatic at an asylum to investigate murky business there, like hiding a million dollars, which the doctor, Lauren Bacall in one of her best parts ever, suspects one of the patients to have hidden away. That patient is Roddy McDowall, and the best scenes are with him and Stuart Whitman together, one really mad and the other acting mad just to get the right information, which finally the doctor (Bacall) finally succeeds in extorting by her medicines and psychiatric tricks, all three are at their very best in acting, but Lauren Bacall actually takes the prize. I have seldom laughed so heartily as at her grand finale, while this actually is a very serious and moral tale, about the vainglory and futility of money. All three are magnificent, and although there are some really revolting scenes hard to digest, the actor does get the better of the actor (Whitman), while that million dollars finally actually is found, exactly in the very condition which Roddy McDowall all the time has insisted, and yet not in quite the expected form.

Bland as opposed to shocking...

[JasparLamarCrabb · 4/10 · 5 April 2014]

A pretty bland thriller with a plot that could have been played out and wrapped up much more quickly via a TWILIGHT ZONE episode. When a wealthy old lady is murdered by her demented gardener, one of her greedy heirs hires actor Stuart Whitman to infiltrate a mental hospital, befriend the gardener and find the whereabouts of a some buried loot. Also on the prowl for the fortune is power mad psychiatrist Lauren Bacall. Directed, poorly, by Denis Sanders and featuring a cast made up of what one would think is camp heaven...in addition to Bacall and Whitman, there's Carol Lynley, Timothy Carey and Roddy McDowell as the gardener. They barely register, though Carey's cameo gives the film a brief lift. Ultimately, it's all silly and very slow moving. Any irony introduced is diminished by multiple endings. Jerry Goldsmith's score is pretty impressive and was clearly expanded upon later on with PLANET OF THE APES.