Shockproof (Douglas Sirk, 1949)

Patricia Knight and Cornel Wilde in Shockproof

Cast: Cornel Wilde, Patricia Knight, John Baragrey, Esther Minciotti, Howard St. John, Russell Collins, Charles Bates. Screenplay: Helen Deutsch, Samuel Fuller. Cinematography: Charles Lawton Jr. Art direction: Carl Anderson. Film editing: Gene Havlick. Music: George Duning. 

Two great stylists of film, Douglas Sirk and Samuel Fuller, met on Shockproof and collided with the Hollywood studio system. The movie, about a by-the-book parole officer who falls for a sexy parolee, was supposed to end with the officer (Cornel Wilde) going rogue for love of the parolee (Patricia Knight), which he does for a while until the movie fizzles into a wholly unconvincing upbeat ending. It's a "curate's egg" of a movie: Some of it is very good -- the noirish parts written by Fuller, and the touches of Sirkian melodrama -- but on the whole it stinks.