Rent Shock (1946)

A Price on Her Head - Shock review by CH

“Give my best to Mrs. Cross.” “Yes, I'm going to meet her at the lodge,” replies Vincent Price in Shock (1946), a line which has one chortling – and horrified.

Why should this be? The dialogue appears unexceptionable. It gives nothing away to cite it because, in the opening scenes, we have witnessed Price club her to death with a candlestick in a San Francisco hotel, where he keeps an apartment, before he returns to the grand, out-of-town asylum over which he presides with elegant authority.

While leaving a flunkey to send the trunk, the late Mrs. Cross therein, to the mountainside lodge which is his bolthole from matters medical.

Not only us, but also Anabel Shaw has witnessed the murder across the way from her hotel suite. She had checked in, anxiously, as she had assumed her serviceman husband (a fresh-complexioned Frank Latimore) dead these past two years only to hear that he has survived and that they will meet here. Her anxiety, heightened by his unexplained delay in fog and the candlestick, leads her to a state of collapse, with a wonderful nightmare sequence which lays her out on the sofa.

As fate has it, Price is summoned to help her – and he finds that her subconscious gives voice to sentences which, in the circumstances, only he is in a position to understand. Under guise of concern, he offers to take her to his sanatorium – something for which the delayed Latimore is grateful.

And all our woe.

Long before Nurse Ratched, there was Lynn Bari – and wow! As the mistress whose sultry presence led Price to clobber his wife, she repeatedly quashes any remaining scruples he is about to summon. Hers is such a bravura performance that anybody should seek out whatever else she appeared in. And, by contrast, has there been a rôle to match Anabel Shaw's? Fiercely sweet-faced, she is mostly in a horizontal position as, wincingly for us, she becomes victim of Price's smoothly-administered needles, part of his process to convince everyone that she is delusional.

In the annals of asylum-set films, can anything match the stormy night when another patient (John Edwards) goes on the loose for several crackling minutes which bring his hands to Anabel Shaw's throat? Director Alfred Werkler is not well known (some of us relish his News is Made at Night, which also features Lynn Bari), but he commands a pace, one of such velocity that, here, it brought to Vincent Price to the fore – and the rest we know.

There is much more than this to see in these seventy minutes. Do so for yourselves.