Grindhouse Fest: Corruption (1968)

-Grindhouse Fest is the special section in Celluloid Dimension where you can discover all the goodies…and baddies from the golden age of exploitation cinema. Have fun!

Corruption (1968) Directed by Robert Hartford-Davis

The weird scenario where Peter Cushing departs the confines of the gothic aristocracy to step into contemporary Britain and the picturesque funkiness of the swinging sixties. Yet Robert Hartford-Davis’s Corruption is not only atypical for a ghoulish actor like Cushing in its modern cultural environment but also strikingly atypical in its dramaturgy of violence.

Peter Cushing plays John Rowan, a prestigious plastic surgeon who is madly in love with a beauteous model named Lynn (Sue Lloyd), who is much younger than he is. The two plan to marry and lead a thriving life together, but alas, fate has another outcome in store for them, one that is murderously inauspicious. During a colorful, tawdry youth party – a mature, awkward Peter Cushing walks among the youth like a hilarious anachronism – his fiancée, while on a glamorous photo shoot in the midst of the revelry, ends up with half of her face burned off because one of the hot bulbs from a heavy lamp landed directly on her immaculate face. From here on, the aesthetic frenzy and the quirky narrative dissect the same issues of beauty obsession as Georges Franju’s Eyes Without a Face but without the arthouse metaphysics; here it’s all physical and ordinary.

The renowned surgeon, played with exquisite madness by Cushing, sacrifices his honorable reputation to rebuild by illicit means the face of his beloved. The exploitation of the film’s more lurid facets is nothing novel or startling – except for seeing Cushing in such sleazy material – it’s standard Grindhouse routine. What stands out is Cushing’s chilling treatment of obsession and insanity. At the time, Cushing had already acted in enough of Hammer’s Frankenstein sequels to have a robust grasp of the notion of obsession through a character as unambiguously obsessive as Frankenstein; thus, one would think – I expected – that his character in Corruption would follow the same moonstruck course with which he handled Hammer’s Frankenstein, but this time Cushing treats obsession with victimization. The clever twist in Corruption’s exploitation poetics is that the most harmless and beautiful character turns out to be the most monstrous in her sociopathic inner self, and of course I’m referring to the character played by Sue Lloyd. Lynn is a nasty narcissist who only pursues her well-being through the idealism of beauty in its perfectionist form. She can’t bear to live with her burned face, she is too pretty to have such a hideous scar, that’s why she manipulates, blackmails and cajoles her besotted fiancé to kill for her, so that he can perform the surgical reconstruction of her face with young flesh.

Cushing never portrays his character as a nefarious killer, but only as a weak man, incapable of mastering his emotions. When he goes in search of women to slay, he hesitates before committing such a horrendous deed, but ultimately his psyche fixated on Lynn’s statuesque figure leads him to consummate the homicidal act. The camera angles amplify the demented condition of the easily manipulated surgeon, with these Corruption stages its cinematic violence as delirium rather than fact. For a film of such a salacious and bare-bones nature it should have been just that, a comprehensible film in its sleaze, yet the conjectures embedded in its storytelling over-complicate the denouement, succumbing to pretentiousness. The story has an ambiguous conclusion, for some it will be exceptional and for others ridiculously pointless. I find myself in the latter group. Nevertheless, I admire Cushing’s performance here, I think he turns Corruption into something more than just a deliberate provocation, it’s also a subconscious provocation where the darkest urges come to the surface. I still don’t know how on earth Cushing ended up accepting a role in such a sleazy movie, but what I do know is that I’m glad he did.

*One more thing, this movie has one of the most stupidly awful taglines ever put on an exploitation movie poster: “Corruption” is not a woman’s picture! Therefore, no woman will be admitted alone to see this super-shock film!