SHOCK. 20th Century Fox, 1946. Vincent Price, Lynn Bari, Frank Latimore, Anabel Shaw, Michael Dunne, Reed Hadley. Director: Alfred L. Werker.

   Vincent Price plays a mad doctor in this one. But not a mad doctor as in a horror movie mad scientist. Rather, Dr. Cross (Price) is a seemingly mild mannered psychiatrist with a successful career. But he’s also having an affair with a nurse colleague (Lynn Bari) and has his share of anger issues.

   And when his wife threatens to spill the beans on him, he snaps and kills her with a silver candlestick holder. Little does he know that there was a witness to the crime, one Janet Stewart (Anabel Shaw), who was in the same hotel as Cross while awaiting her husband’s return from a POW camp after the end of the Second World War.

   When her military officer husband finds her, Janet is in a state of shock. Apparently witnessing Cross murder his wife was too much for her mental state. And guess who gets called in to help with her mental health woes? You guessed it. The very same Dr. Cross. Yes, the doctor tasked with tending to a psychiatric patient is a murderer, she’s a witness, and no one will believe her. That, in a nutshell, is the core of the film.

   Price is in true form as a smug, calculating, and devious physician who is so corrupted by his love for his nurse that he’s willing to breach every moral code to get his way. Fortunately, an intrepid police investigator (Reed Hadley) is not so enamoured of the doctor’s charms and has his own suspicions about how and why Cross’s wife was murdered.

   Shock is a relatively short film (some 69 or 70 minutes), but packs a lot into it. Even though the movie doesn’t touch upon politics, it feels very much like a post-war paranoid thriller. Recommended.