Shock (1946 film)

Shock is a 1946 American film noir directed by Alfred L. Werker

As Stewart comes out of her shock, she recognizes Dr. Cross as the killer. He then takes her to his sanitarium and at Elaines urging, gives Janet an overdose of insulin under the pretense of administering insulin shock therapy. He cant bring himself to murder her in cold blood, though, and asks Elaine to get the medicine to save her. Elaine refuses, they argue, and he strangles her. A colleague of Dr. Cross, Dr. Harvey, saves Janets life and Dr. Cross is taken into custody by a lawyer from the District Attorneys office.Above and beyond the typical characteristics of the horror film genre, reviewer Bosley Crowther of The New York Times took particular offense to the films treatment of Price as a psychiatrist who attempts to do away with his patient, a woman who has lost her mind after witnessing the murder her own doctor had committed. Coming in the wake of World War II, in which so may people had suffered shock and could benefit from treatment of their anxieties, Crowther asked the critical observer to protest in no uncertain tones the movies social disservice in its fostering apprehension against the treatment of nervous disorders, deploring the lack of consideration for those in need of treatment evidenced by producer Aubrey Schenck and distributor Twentieth CenturyFox. Philip K. Scheuer of the Los Angeles Times took no such offense, calling the film a nominal B feature, which screenplay author Eugene Ling and Director Alfred Werker have imbued... with a gradeA suspense. Jonathan Malcolm Lampley wrote in Women in the Horror Films of Vincent Price that his role in this film foreshadows the mad doctors and scientists Price would frequently portray in his later career. ........

Source: Wikipedia