There’s a riveting new Criterion Channel series called Hollywood Crack-Up: The Decade American Cinema Lost Its Mind. It’s a category of 1960s films featuring characters spinning out of control, breaking down, going insane. But from a socialist standpoint, the series is most compelling in the way these films expose the context for breakdown, showing the madness built into American social systems and the cultural cruelties that govern ordinary life here.

In the 1960s, more and more filmmakers were recognizing America as a place that seems designed to send its citizens right over the edge. The line-up of films includes cult favorites (Pretty Poison, Targets), interesting experiments by respected directors (Faces, Lilith, Uptight, The Chase), and very obscure but startling low-budget films (Pressure Point, The World’s Greatest Sinner) along with well-known studio productions (The Manchurian Candidate, Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Shock Corridor, Seconds, Point Blank).

Several of the films deal literally with mental health crises, but in ways that make them offbeat, thought-provoking social critiques. Samuel Fuller’s wild pulp mind-bender Shock Corridor (1963) centers on an obsessively ambitious reporter named Johnny Barrett who’s convinced he might win the Pulitzer Prize if he feigns mental illness well enough to be institutionalized and then solve a murder that was committed in the asylum.