Shame Is A Film That Is Well Worth A Look
In the pantheon of directors and producers, in all the history of American cinema, very few have made contributions on the level of Roger Corman. Sure, he’s primarily known as a schlockmeister, but let’s not forget that he didn’t just direct B movies, he defined them. Schlocky B movies were his bread and butter, how he supported his production house, and he owned that genre. Additionally, he used the money he made from these monster flicks and girly shows and used it to produce some real American classics. Shame is one of them, and belongs on your queue the next time you login to your movie download service.
The film is remarkably brave, focusing on racial hatred and tension in the south. This may not sound like a big deal, and civil rights movement films have since become a genre. However, you have to consider… It’s easy to make a movie about tolerance in the 1990’s, filming on Hollywood sets designed to look like towns in Georgia and Alabama. Corman actually took his crew to a small southern town at the start of the movement. It’s not hyperbolic at all to say that he really risked his life for this movie, as he and his team received death threats.
The real star of the film is William Shatner as a villainous political agent. He’s currently working for a segregationist running for office, and he moves into this town with one purpose in mind: Stir up racially motivated violence. It’s a dark, disturbing character, and Shatner is incredible in the role. He usually plays the sort of roles that play off of his boyish charm and good looks, his uniquely friendly sense of machismo and his humor. To see this reversed in this early role is something like seeing Henry Fonda as the villain in Once Upon a Time in the West.
The concept of the charming racist villain may have been inspired by Adolf Hitler. Corman could have hired a villain actor to play the villain, but the inspired choice of casting someone who seems innocent on the outside exemplifies a primary theme of the film, that being that you need a handsome spokesman to sell ugly ideas.
Corman and his crew were run out of town by the local police when it became clear what sort of a film they were creating, and that it could mean trouble for segregationists. The final shots were literally filmed “on the run”. As in, Corman was filming at one end of the street while a virtual lynch mob was closing in from the opposite end of the street, so Corman had to grab the shots and flee.
At this year’s Oscars, the lifetime achievement award goes to Roger Corman, and there has been remarkably little coverage of his life and his work. It’s too bad, because few filmmakers have contributed so much to the world of cinema for so little thanks.
Yes, Corman made a name for himself as a schlockmeister, but he also directed some real American classics and he launched the careers of Dennis Hopper, Jack Nicholson and Martin Scorsese, to name a few. The modern cinematic landscape wouldn’t be the same without Corman’s incredible contributions to the industry.
If you still haven’t seen any of Corman’s good movies, start with this one, then check out X: The Man With The X-Ray Eyes. Yes, he made a lot of cheap monster movies, he made the sort of sci-fi flicks where you could see the zippers on the alien’s suit, but he also made some true classics both in the horror and sci-fi genres, and outside of his familiar territory, and Shame is an example of what gifts the man has when he can step away from the marketable genres and really put his heart and daring into a project.
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