Cinema: Boredom in Bedlam

Shock Treatment is more than a slip, it's a Freudian pratfall. It makes a shambles of psychiatry and brings the art of film close to idiocy. Stuart Whitman is hired to bluff his way into a mental hospital where Psychotic Killer Roddy McDowall may or may not reveal the location of $1,000,000 in stolen cash. But malevolent Psychiatrist Lauren Bacall also craves money, to continue her research. When she hits on Whitman's game, she prescribes electroshock therapy, then injects a concoction into his jugular vein to induce catatonia.

The "horrible twisted images" Whitman reports seeing may well be his fellow players, feigning madness in the best amateur style while a sound track symphony booms music to go to pieces by. As a manic-depressive sex kitten, Carol Lynley somehow suggests that a good fortified cereal would put her back together again. McDowall and Whitman, tending the rose garden, make thorny work of it. And Actress Bacall, woefully miscast, exercises her steel-and-velvet charm as if she were running a rest home for demented Bunnies. Bacall's throatiest, most telling line: "I detest stupid people who think they can fake mental illness." Fortunately, nobody need submit to Shock Treatment unless he is dragged in screaming.