User Reviews

. ***SPOILERS*** This "Naked City" episode very obviously inspired the Samuel Fuller cult movie "Shock Corridor" some four years later with Det. James Halloran, James Franciscus,going under cover as a mental patient to uncover a murder committed at the mental ward at the Welfare Island Hospital. It's when Jeramie Watkins an eye witness to a mob murder was found strangled in his bed in the hospital mental ward that it was decided that Det. Halloran have himself checked into the hospital as a man suffering from extreme emotional depression to find Watkins' killer. It was Watkins who was actually under police protection not suffering from any mental ailment when he was secretly, under an assumed name, admitted into the what everyone calls the "Funny Farm".

At first blending in with the mental patients Det. Hallaron slips up by trying to be the both craziest and strongest man in the mental ward that his identity as a cop is quickly uncovered by his fellow inmates. It's just when Halleron is about to be done in that Watkins' killer ironically comes to his rescue. And at the same time reveals who he really is. Not just Watkins murderer but the person secretly committed by the mob inside the mental ward in order to get to and murder Jeremy Watkins!

****SPOILERS*** The ending of this "Naked City" episode is very much like that of the 1948 movie "The Nasked City" with Watkins' killer on the run from the law and trapped on the 59th Street or Queensboro Bridge. It was both sad an ironic that the very person who saved undercover policeman James Halloran's life from the crazed and mentally unstable mental patients ended up himself killed or gunned down by the police lead by Det. Halloran in trying to escape from justice!And the justice he got was a bullet in his gut and a 150 foot fall to his death into the polluted East River

Stirlling Silliphant was in a strange mood when he penned this one-off episode, which begins suspensefully with James Franciscus' wife committing him in a comatose state into a mental hospital on Welfare Island (which was renamed Roosevelt Island 15 years after this show was filmed). We soon learn he's going undercover to find the murderer who just offed a witness in a mob case who was incarcerated in that ward.

An interesting premise here is that the killer is actually the only sane guy in the ward -the real mental patients are relatively harmless -this inversion of conventional wisdom conforms to the reality that unlike the prejudice that the mentally ill are the key reason for mass killings that currently permeate our headlines, in fact the mentally ill are more likely to be victims than victimizers.

Franciscus does a fine job pretending to be sick (and violent) until the patients find a photo in his visiting wife's purse that tags him as a cop instead. Before they can gang up on him and kill him he figures out who the real killer is, making for a photogenic chase on location at the Queensborough Bridge leading to some phony sentimentality at the end. Among the nuts in the cast is a very young Donald Moffat, fun to see in his first credited screen role.