I love this movie so much

This is How Movies Should Be Made

Fantastic!

Strong acting helps the film overcome an uncertain premise and create characters that hold our attention absolutely.

***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!

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.

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!

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.