Community hub
Recent from talks
Contribute something
Nothing was collected or created yet.
Samuel Fuller
View on Wikipedia
Samuel Michael Fuller (August 12, 1912 – October 30, 1997)[1] was an American film director, screenwriter, novelist, journalist, and actor. He was known for directing low-budget genre movies with controversial themes, often made outside the conventional studio system.
Key Information
After working as a reporter and a pulp novelist, Fuller wrote his first screenplay for Hats Off in 1936, and made his directorial debut with the Western I Shot Jesse James (1949). He continued to direct several other Westerns and war films throughout the 1950s. He shifted genres in the 1960s with his low-budget thriller Shock Corridor in 1963, followed by the neo-noir The Naked Kiss (1964).
Fuller was inactive in filmmaking for most of the 1970s, before writing and directing the semi-autobiographical war epic The Big Red One (1980), and the drama White Dog (1982), whose screenplay he co-wrote with Curtis Hanson. Several of his films influenced French New Wave filmmakers, notably Jean-Luc Godard, who gave him a cameo appearance in Pierrot le Fou (1965).[2][3] In the latter part of his career, he worked mainly in Europe and lived in Paris.
Early life
[edit]Samuel Michael Fuller was born in Worcester, Massachusetts, of Jewish parents, Rebecca (née Baum) and Benjamin Fuller.[4] His father died in 1923 when Samuel was 11. After immigrating to the United States, the family's surname was changed from Rabinovitch to Fuller, a name possibly inspired by Samuel Fuller (Pilgrim), a doctor who arrived in America on the Mayflower.[5] In his autobiography, A Third Face (2002), he says that he did not speak until he was almost five. His first word was "Hammer!"[6][7]
After his father's death, the family moved to New York City, where at the age of 12, he began working as a newspaper copyboy. He became a crime reporter in New York City at age 17, working for the New York Evening Graphic. He broke the story of actress Jeanne Eagels' death.[8] He wrote pulp novels, including The Dark Page (1944; reissued in 2007 with an introduction by Wim Wenders),[9] which was later adapted into the 1952 movie Scandal Sheet.
Late in life he said, "If only a reporter could get a thousand dollars an hour the way a director does, I'd be in it today".[10]
Military service
[edit]During World War II, Fuller joined the United States Army. He was assigned as an infantryman to the 16th Infantry Regiment, 1st Infantry Division, and saw heavy fighting. He was involved in landings in Africa, Sicily, and Normandy, and also saw action in Belgium and Czechoslovakia. In 1945, he was present at the liberation of a German concentration camp in Falkenau. He shot 16-mm footage, known as V-E +1, that was later integrated into the French documentary Falkenau: The Impossible (1988). In 2014, the footage was selected for the United States National Film Registry.[11] For his military service, Fuller was awarded the Silver Star, Bronze Star, Purple Heart, and Combat Infantryman Badge. He reached the rank of corporal.[12]
Fuller used his wartime experiences as material in his films, especially in The Big Red One (1980), the nickname for the U.S. 1st Infantry Division. After the war, Fuller co-authored a regimental history of the 16th Infantry.[13]
Career
[edit]Writing and directing
[edit]Hats Off (1936) marked Fuller's first credit as a screenwriter. He wrote many screenplays throughout his career, such as Gangs of the Waterfront in 1945. He was unimpressed with Douglas Sirk's direction of his Shockproof screenplay, and made the jump to writer/director after being asked to write three films by independent producer Robert Lippert. Fuller agreed to write them if he would be allowed to direct them, as well, with no extra fee. Lippert agreed. Fuller's first film under this arrangement was I Shot Jesse James (1949), followed by The Baron of Arizona with Vincent Price.[14]
Fuller's third film, The Steel Helmet, established him as a major force. The first film about the Korean War, made just six months into that conflict,[15] he wrote it based largely on his own World War II experiences and tales coming out of Korea. The film was attacked by reporter Victor Riesel for being "pro-Communist" and "anti-American." Critic Westford Pedravy alleged Fuller was secretly financed by "the Reds."[16] Fuller had a major argument with the U.S. Army, which provided stock footage for the film. When army officials objected to Fuller's American characters executing a prisoner of war, Fuller replied he had seen it done during his own military service. A compromise was reached when the lieutenant threatens the sergeant with a court martial. The film marked the first collaboration between Fuller and actor Gene Evans. The studio wanted a more prominent star such as John Wayne, but Fuller was adamant that Evans be used because he was impressed by his fellow veteran's authentic portrayal of a soldier.[17]
After the success of The Steel Helmet, Fuller was sought out by the major studios. All gave him advice on tax shelters, except for Darryl F. Zanuck of 20th Century-Fox, who replied, "We make better movies," the answer Fuller was seeking. Zanuck signed Fuller for a contract for seven films, the first being another Korean War film, Fixed Bayonets!, to head off other studio competition copying The Steel Helmet. The U.S. Army assigned Medal of Honor recipient Raymond Harvey as Fuller's technical advisor; the two struck up a long friendship during filming, and Harvey later returned to advise him on Verboten!.
The proposed seventh film, Tigrero, based on a book by Sasha Siemel, is the subject of a 1994 documentary by Mika Kaurismäki. Tigrero: A Film That Was Never Made featured Fuller and Jim Jarmusch visiting the proposed Amazon locations of the film. Film Fuller shot on location at the time was featured in his Shock Corridor.
Fuller's favorite film was Park Row, a story of American journalism.[18] Zanuck had wanted to adapt it into a musical, but Fuller refused.[19] Instead, he started his own production company with his profits to make the film on his own. Park Row was a labor of love and served as a tribute to the journalists he knew as a newsboy. His flourishes of style on a very low budget led critics such as Bill Krohn to compare the film to Citizen Kane. Fuller followed this with Pickup on South Street (1953), a film noir starring Richard Widmark, which became one of his best-known films.[20] Other films Fuller directed in the 1950s include House of Bamboo, Forty Guns, and China Gate, which led to protests from the French government and a friendship with writer Romain Gary. After leaving Fox, Fuller started his Globe Productions that made Run of the Arrow, Verboten!, and The Crimson Kimono, and produced, wrote, and directed a television pilot about World War II soldiers to be titled Dogface, which was not picked up.[21]
In 1961, Warner Bros. offered to finance The Big Red One in return for his making Merrill's Marauders. When Fuller had problems with Warner Bros.' editing of his film, the Big Red One fell through.[22]
Fuller's films throughout the 1950s and early 1960s generally were lower-budget genre movies exploring controversial subjects. Shock Corridor (1963) is set in a psychiatric hospital, while The Naked Kiss (1964) featured a prostitute attempting to change her life by working in a pediatric ward.[23] Both films were released by Allied Artists.
Between 1967 and 1980, Fuller directed only one film, the Mexican-produced Shark! (1969). Fuller unsuccessfully asked the Directors Guild to remove his name from the credits of Shark.[24] He returned in 1980 with the epic The Big Red One, the semiautobiographical story of a platoon of soldiers and their harrowing experiences during World War II. The film won critical praise, but failed at the box office.
"Shelve the film without letting anyone see it? I was dumbfounded. It's difficult to express the hurt of having a finished film locked away in a vault, never to be screened for an audience. It's like someone putting your newborn baby in a goddamned maximum-security prison forever ... Moving to France for a while would alleviate some of the pain and doubt that I had to live with because of White Dog."
In 1981, he was selected to direct the film White Dog, based on a novel by Romain Gary.[26] The controversial film depicts the struggle of a black dog trainer trying to de-program a "white dog," a stray that was programmed to attack any black person viciously. He readily agreed to work on the film, having focused much of his career on racial issues.[27] Already familiar with the novel and with the concept of "white dogs," he was tasked with "reconceptualizing" the film to have the conflict depicted in the book occur within the dog rather than the people.[25] He used the film as a platform to deliver an anti-racist message through the film's examination of the question of whether racism is a treatable problem or an incurable disease.[26][28]
During filming, Paramount Pictures grew increasingly concerned the film would offend African-American viewers, and brought in two consultants to review the work and offer their approval on the way Black characters were depicted.[25][27][29] One felt the film had no racist connotations, while the other, Willis Edwards, vice president of the Hollywood NAACP chapter, felt the film was inflammatory and should never have been made.[27] The two men provided a write-up of their views for the studio executives, which were passed to producer Jon Davison along with warnings that the studio was afraid the film would be boycotted. Fuller was not told of these discussions, nor given the notes until two weeks before filming was slated to conclude. Known for being a staunch integrationist and for regularly giving Black actors nonstereotypical roles, Fuller was furious, finding the studio's actions insulting. He reportedly had both representatives banned from the set afterwards, though he did integrate some of the suggested changes into the film.[27][29] After the film's completion, Paramount refused to release it, declaring it did not have enough earnings potential to go against the threatened NAACP boycotts and possible bad publicity.[25][26][27][30]
After White Dog was shelved by Paramount Pictures, Fuller moved to France in 1982 and never directed another American film.[25][26] He directed two theatrical French films, Les Voleurs de la nuit in 1984 and Street of No Return in 1989. Les Voleurs de la nuit was entered into the 34th Berlin International Film Festival.[31] He directed his last film, The Madonna and the Dragon, in 1990, and he wrote his last screenplay, Girls in Prison, in 1994.
With his wife, Christa Lang, and Jerry Rudes, Fuller wrote an autobiography A Third Face (published in 2002). This was the culmination of a long career as an author. Among his books are the novels "Burn, Baby, Burn" (1935), Test Tube Baby (1936), Make Up and Kiss (1938), and The Dark Page (1944). Novelizations of his films include The Naked Kiss (1964), The Big Red One (1980; reissued 2005), 144 Piccadilly (1971), and Quint's World (1988). A book-length interview of Fuller by Jean Narboni and Noel Simsolo, Il etait une fois ... Samuel Fuller (with a preface by Martin Scorsese) appeared in 1986.
Acting
[edit]Fuller made a cameo appearance in Jean-Luc Godard's Pierrot le Fou (1965), where he famously intones: "Film is like a battleground ... Love, hate, action, violence, death. In one word, emotion!"[32] He also made a cameo appearance at an outdoor cafe in Luc Moullet's Brigitte et Brigitte (1966) along with French New Wave directors Claude Chabrol, Eric Rohmer, and André Téchiné. He plays a film director in Dennis Hopper's ill-fated The Last Movie (1971);[33] an Army colonel in Steven Spielberg's 1941 (1979); a war correspondent in his film The Big Red One (scene deleted in the original release, restored in the reconstructed version),[34] a talent agent in his film White Dog (1981), and a cameraman in Wim Wenders' The State of Things (1982). He portrays an American gangster in two films set in Germany: The American Friend by Wenders and Helsinki Napoli All Night Long by Mika Kaurismäki. He also appeared in Larry Cohen's A Return to Salem's Lot (1987), and played a businessman in La Vie de Bohème (1992) by Aki Kaurismäki. His last work in film was as an actor in The End of Violence (1997). A photo of Fuller also appears on one of the mirrors of a stripper in his Shock Corridor.
Style and themes
[edit]Fuller's work has been described as primitive by Luc Moullet and by the influential American critics Manny Farber and Andrew Sarris.[35] Grant Tracey has used the term "narrative tabloid" to refer to Fuller's style of filmmaking.[36] This was the result of his often lower budgets, but also reflected Fuller's pulp-inspired writing.
Fuller was known for using intense close-ups, off-center framings, and shock editing in many of his films, which were often about men facing death in combat. These scenes were both violent and tragic.[30] Fuller often featured marginalized characters in his films. The protagonist of Pickup on South Street is a pickpocket who lives on a floating shack in the East River. Shock Corridor concerns the patients of a mental hospital. Underworld U.S.A. (1961) focuses on an orphaned victim of mobsters. The lead female characters of Pickup on South Street, China Gate, and The Naked Kiss are prostitutes or gun molls. These characters sometimes find retribution for the injustices against them. White Dog and The Crimson Kimono (1959) have definite antiracist elements. The Steel Helmet, set during the Korean War, features a racially mixed cast and contains dialogue about the internment of Japanese-Americans and the segregation of the American military in World War II.
Several Fuller's films, including The Naked Kiss, The Baron of Arizona, Shockproof, House of Bamboo, Forty Guns, and The Big Red One, feature a leading character with the same name, Griff.
Later life and death
[edit]In the early 1990s, Samuel Fuller, along with his wife, Christa, and their daughter Samantha, settled into a small apartment at 61 rue de Reuilly in the 12th arrondissement of Paris,[37] but after he suffered a stroke in 1994, they returned to the States the following year.[38] They resided in Los Angeles, where Fuller lived until he died at home of natural causes.
In November 1997, the Directors Guild held a three-hour memorial in his honor, hosted by Curtis Hanson, his longtime friend and co-writer on White Dog. He was survived by his wife and daughter.[39]
Legacy
[edit]Although Fuller's films were not considered great cinema in their time, they gained critical respect in the late 1960s. Fuller welcomed the newfound esteem, appearing in films of other directors and associating himself with younger filmmakers. The French New Wave claimed Fuller as a major stylistic influence,[40] especially Luc Moullet.[41] His visual style and rhythm were seen as distinctly American, and praised for their energetic simplicity. Martin Scorsese praised Fuller's ability to capture action through camera movement.[42] In the 1996 Adam Simon-directed documentary The Typewriter, the Rifle & the Movie Camera, Quentin Tarantino and Jim Jarmusch credited Fuller as influential upon their works.[43] Most recently, his wife Christa Lang produced a documentary directed by their daughter Samantha about him. A Fuller Life uses footage he captured himself with celebrities such as James Franco reading from his autobiography.[44]
In the mid-1980s, Fuller was the first international director to be a guest at the Midnight Sun Film Festival.[45] The festival's hometown, Sodankylä, Finland, named a street "Samuel Fullerin katu" ("Samuel Fuller's street").
The moving image collection of Samuel Fuller is housed at the Academy Film Archive.[46] The archive has preserved several of Samuel Fuller's films, including The Crimson Kimono, Underworld U.S.A., and Pickup on South Street.[47] Additionally, the archive has preserved several of Fuller's home movies, including those shot during his war service.[48]
Filmography
[edit]Film
[edit]| Year | Title | Director | Writer | Producer | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1936 | Hats Off | No | Yes | No | |
| 1937 | It Happened in Hollywood | No | Yes | No | |
| 1938 | Adventure in Sahara | No | Story | No | |
| Federal Man-Hunt | No | Story | No | ||
| Gangs of New York | No | Story | No | ||
| 1940 | Bowery Boy | No | Yes | No | |
| 1941 | Confirm or Deny | No | Story | No | |
| 1943 | Margin for Error | No | Uncredited | No | |
| Power of the Press | No | Story | No | ||
| 1945 | Gangs of the Waterfront | No | Story | No | |
| 1949 | Shockproof | No | Yes | No | |
| I Shot Jesse James | Yes | Yes | No | ||
| 1950 | The Baron of Arizona | Yes | Yes | No | |
| 1951 | The Steel Helmet | Yes | Yes | Yes | |
| Fixed Bayonets! | Yes | Yes | No | ||
| The Tanks Are Coming | No | Story | No | ||
| 1952 | Park Row | Yes | Yes | Yes | |
| 1953 | Pickup on South Street | Yes | Yes | No | |
| 1954 | Hell and High Water | Yes | Yes | No | |
| 1955 | House of Bamboo | Yes | Yes | No | |
| 1957 | China Gate | Yes | Yes | Yes | |
| Run of the Arrow | Yes | Yes | Yes | ||
| Forty Guns | Yes | Yes | Yes | ||
| 1959 | Verboten! | Yes | Yes | Yes | |
| The Crimson Kimono | Yes | Yes | Yes | ||
| 1961 | Underworld U.S.A. | Yes | Yes | Yes | |
| 1962 | Merrill's Marauders | Yes | Yes | No | |
| 1963 | Shock Corridor | Yes | Yes | Yes | |
| 1964 | The Naked Kiss | Yes | Yes | Yes | |
| 1967 | The Cape Town Affair | No | Yes | No | |
| 1968 | Targets | No | Uncredited | No | |
| 1969 | Shark! | Yes | Yes | No | |
| 1973 | The Deadly Trackers | No | Yes | No | Replaced as director by Barry Shear |
| 1974 | The Klansman | No | Yes | No | |
| 1980 | The Big Red One | Yes | Yes | No | |
| 1982 | White Dog | Yes | Yes | No | |
| 1984 | Thieves After Dark | Yes | Yes | No | |
| 1986 | Let's Get Harry | No | Story | No | |
| 1989 | Street of No Return | Yes | Yes | No | Also supervising editor |
| 1994 | Girls in Prison | No | Yes | No |
Acting roles
| Year | Title | Role | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1955 | House of Bamboo | Policeman | Uncredited |
| 1965 | Pierrot le Fou | Himself | |
| 1966 | Brigitte et Brigitte | ||
| 1971 | The Last Movie | Sam | |
| 1973 | The Young Nurses | Doc Haskell | |
| 1977 | Scott Joplin | Impersario | |
| The American Friend | The American | ||
| 1979 | 1941 | Interceptor Commander | |
| 1980 | The Big Red One | War Correspondent | |
| 1982 | Hammett | Man in Pool Hall | |
| White Dog | Charles Felton | ||
| The State of Things | Joe | ||
| Slapstick of Another Kind | Col. Sharp | ||
| 1984 | Thieves After Dark | Zoltan | Uncredited |
| 1987 | A Return to Salem's Lot | Dr. Van Meer | |
| 1989 | Street of No Return | Police Commissioner | |
| Sons | Father | ||
| 1992 | La Vie de bohème | Gassot | |
| Golem, the Spirit of the Exile | Elimelek | ||
| 1994 | Golem, le jardin pétrifié | Sam | |
| Somebody to Love | Sam Silverman | ||
| 1996 | Metamorphosis of a Melody | Flavius Josephus (voice) | |
| 1997 | The End of Violence | Louis Bering |
Television
[edit]| Year | Title | Director | Writer | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1959 | Dog Face | Yes | No | Television film |
| 1962 | The Dick Powell Show | Yes | No | Episode: "330 Independence S.W." |
| The Virginian | Yes | No | Episode: "It Tolls for Thee" | |
| 1966-67 | Iron Horse | Yes | No | 6 episodes |
| 1972 | Tatort | Yes | Yes | Episode: "Dead Pigeon on Beethoven Street" |
| 1990 | Chiller | Yes | No | Episode: "The Day of Reckoning" |
| The Madonna and the Dragon | Yes | Yes | Television film |
Producer
| Year | Title | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| 1950-54 | The Colgate Comedy Hour | Executive/supervising producer(19 episodes) Production manager (15 episodes) |
| 1952-53 | Four Star Revue | Executive producer (4 episodes) |
Acting roles
| Year | Title | Role | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1972 | Tatort | Senator | Episode "Dead Pigeon on Beethoven Street" |
| 1984 | The Blood of Others | Old Man in Cafe | Television film |
| 1988 | Médecins des hommes | American Captain | Episode: "Mer de Chine: Le pays pour mémoire" |
| 1989 | David Lansky | Capodagli / John Fraser | Episode "L'enfant americain" |
| 1990 | The Madonna and the Dragon | Newsweek Editor | Television film |
| 1994 | Le cascadeur | William Davidson | Episode "Le saut de la mort" |
Bibliography
[edit]| Year | Title | Publisher |
|---|---|---|
| 1935 | Burn, Baby, Burn | Phoenix Press |
| 1936 | Test Tube Baby | William Godwin |
| 1938 | Make Up and Kiss | William Godwin |
| 1944 | The Dark Page | Duell, Sloan, and Pearce |
| 1966 | Crown of India | Award |
| 1971 | 144 Piccadilly | Baron |
| 1974 | Dead Pigeon on Beethoven Street | Pyramid |
| 1980 | The Big Red One | Bantam Books |
| 1984 | Quint's World | Don Mills |
| 1986 | Pecos Bill and the Soho Kid | Les Editions Bayard |
| 1993 | Brainquake | Hard Case Crime |
| 2002 | A Third Face: My Tale of Writing, Fighting, and Filmmaking | Alfred A. Knopf |
Awards and nominations
[edit]| Institution | Year | Category | Work | Result |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Berlin International Film Festival | 1984 | Golden Bear | Thieves After Dark | Nominated |
| Cahiers du Cinéma | 1965 | Annual Top 10 Lists | Shock Corridor | 7th place |
| 1982 | White Dog | 4th place | ||
| Cannes Film Festival | 1980 | Palme d'Or | The Big Red One | Nominated |
| Deauville American Film Festival | 1991 | Lucien Barriere Award | — | Won |
| Directors Guild of America Awards | 1955 | Outstanding Directing – Feature Film | Hell and High Water | Won |
| Independent Spirit Awards | 1996 | Special Distinction Award | — | Won |
| Locarno Film Festival | 1993 | Leopard of Honor | — | Won |
| Los Angeles Film Critics Association | 1987 | Career Achievement Award | — | Won |
| Valladolid International Film Festival | 1966 | Golden Spike | Shock Corridor | Won |
| CEC Award | Won | |||
| Venice Film Festival | 1953 | Golden Lion | Pickup on South Street | Nominated |
| Bronze Lion | Won | |||
| Writers Guild of America Awards | 1952 | Best Written American Drama (Low-Budget) | The Steel Helmet | Won |
References
[edit]- ^ Samuel Fuller, with Christa Fuller and Jerome Rudes, A Third Face: My Tale of Writing, Fighting, and Filmmaking (Hal Leonard Corporation, 2002) p7
- ^ "Director's Cut". The New Yorker. November 18, 2002. Retrieved November 16, 2021.
- ^ "10 essential films from the French New Wave". March 14, 2021. Retrieved November 16, 2021.
- ^ "Samuel Fuller".
- ^ p.7 Fuller, Samuel. A Third Face. Alfred A Knopf (2002)
- ^ Liukkonen, Petri. "Samuel Fuller". Books and Writers (kirjasto.sci.fi). Finland: Kuusankoski Public Library. Archived from the original on December 31, 2014.
- ^ Fuller, Samuel; Fuller, Christa; Rudes, Jerome (2002). A third face : My tale of writing, fighting, and filmmaking. Alfred A. Knopf. ISBN 978-0-375-40165-7.
- ^ p.51 Fuller
- ^ "Library of Congress LCCN Permalink for 44009240". loc.gov. 1944.
- ^ Severo, Richard (November 1, 1997). "Samuel Fuller, Director, Is Dead at 85; A Master of Unsettling Low-Budget Films". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved August 16, 2023.
- ^ "Cinematic Treasures Named To National Film Registry". Library of Congress. December 17, 2014. Retrieved January 3, 2017.
- ^ Biography Archived September 7, 2008, at the Wayback Machine at Litweb.net
- ^ "Archived copy" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on January 2, 2015. Retrieved January 2, 2015.
{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link) - ^ Eclipse Series 5: The First Films of Samuel Fuller from The Criterion Collection website
- ^ The Men Who Made the Movies: Sam Fuller, Turner Classic Movies 2002
- ^ p.262 Fuller
- ^ Fuller, Samuel A Third Face. 2002: Alfred A Knopf
- ^ Schick, Elizabeth A. (December 1998). Current Biography Yearbook 1999. H.W. Wilson. p. 641. ISBN 978-0-8242-0957-5. Retrieved April 12, 2011.
- ^ Fuller, Samuel. A Third Face. Alfred A Knopf (2002)
- ^ DVD of the Week: Pickup on South Street|The New Yorker
- ^ p.120 Dombrowski, Lisa The Films of Samuel Fuller: If You Die, I'll Kill You Wesleyan University Press, March 31, 2008.
- ^ p. 142 Dobrowski
- ^ DVD of the Week: "The Naked Kiss" | The New Yorker
- ^ Movie of the Week: "Shark!"|The New Yorker
- ^ a b c d e Hoberman, J (November 28, 2008). "White Dog: Sam Fuller Unmuzzled". The Criterion Collection. Retrieved January 26, 2009.
- ^ a b c d Kehr, Dave (November 29, 1991). "Fuller's fable 'White Dog' has its day at last". Chicago Tribune: C. ISSN 1085-6706.
- ^ a b c d e Dombrowski, Lisa (November–December 2008). "Every Dog Has Its Day: The Muzzling of Samuel Fuller's White Dog". Film Comment. 44 (6): 46–49.
- ^ Moran, Kim (December 12, 2008). "Movies on DVD: White Dog". Entertainment Weekly. No. 1025. p. 56. ISSN 1049-0434.
- ^ a b Taylor, Charles (November 2, 2008). "White Dog 1982". New York Times. New York City: MT. 16.
- ^ a b Doherty, Thomas (August 8, 2008). "Sam the Man". The Chronicle Review. 54 (48): B11.
- ^ "Berlinale: 1984 Programme". berlinale.de. Retrieved January 4, 2011.
- ^ Brody, Richard (2008). Everything is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-LucGodard. Metropolitan Books. p. 246. ISBN 978-0-8050-6886-3.
- ^ Cigars and Cinema with Sam Fuller, an interview from geraldpeary.com
- ^ The Big Red One a film by Samuel Fuller
- ^ Dombrowski, Lisa (2008). If You Die, I'll Kill You: the Films of Samuel Fuller. Wesleyan University Press. p. 8.
- ^ The Narrative Tabloid of Samuel Fuller by Grant Tracey, from imagesjournal.com
- ^ "THE BIG RED ONE - MOVIE LEGEND SAM FULLER SHOWS AND TELLS – IN CANNES AND PARIS". americancinemapapers.com.
- ^ "Un troisième visage" (PDF). editions-allia.com.
- ^ Thomas, Kevin (November 24, 1997). "Celebrating Fuller to the Fullest, at Last". Los Angeles Times. p. F1.
- ^ Scope Book Review Michael Brian Faucette
- ^ Moullet, Luc. "Sam Fuller-sur les brisees de Marlowe" Cahiers du Cinéma93, March 1959
- ^ Martin Scorsese, "Samuel Fuller, ou le mouvement comme émotion", Les Cahiers du Cinéma 519, December 1997, pp. 44-45
- ^ MrBlonde-22 (June 28, 1996). "The Typewriter, the Rifle & the Movie Camera (1996)". IMDb.
{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link) - ^ "The Soapbox Office Podcast: Episode 2: Bowling For Tigrero". soapboxoffice.com. Retrieved June 28, 2016.
- ^ History of the Midnight Sun Film Festival Archived December 25, 2008, at the Wayback Machine
- ^ "Sam Fuller Collection". Academy Film Archive. September 5, 2014.
- ^ "Preserved Projects". Academy Film Archive.
- ^ "Preserved Projects". Academy Film Archive. Retrieved March 4, 2024.
Further reading
[edit]- Wollen, Peter, and Will, David (eds.), 1969, Samuel Fuller, Edinburgh International Film Festival / Scottish International Review
- Amiel, Olivier. Samuel Fuller. Paris: Henri Veyrier, 1985.
- A detailed biography of Fuller, describing his narrative style, mise en scene, production, the critical and commercial reception of his films, and his ambitions in directing and screenwriting.
- Dombroski, Lisa, If You Die, I'll Kill You: the Films of Samuel Fuller, Wesleyan University Press, 2008.
- Fuller, Samuel with Christa Lang Fuller and Jerome Henry Rudes. A Third Face : My Tale of Writing, Fighting and Filmmaking. New York: A. Knopf, 2002
- Sam Fuller's autobiography
- Server, Lee. Sam Fuller. Film Is a Battleground. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, Inc. 1994.
- The Subtitle describes the contents: 'A Critical Study, with Interviews, a Filmography and a Bibliography'. Includes an extended interview with Fuller himself, and shorter reminiscences of collaborators, such as Vincent Price, Richard Widmark, Constance Towers, and Robert Stack.
External links
[edit]
- Samuel Fuller at IMDb
- American Film Institute interview from fathom.com
- Jonathan Rosenbaum interview
- Foco - Revista de Cinema, special edition devoted to Samuel Fuller
- Article – Portuguese Magazine
- Cinema's Beautiful Blowhard, Appreciation of Fuller by Meakin Armstrong in Guernica Magazine
| International | |
|---|---|
| National | |
| Academics | |
| Artists | |
| People | |
| Other | |
Samuel Fuller
View on GrokipediaSamuel Michael Fuller (August 12, 1912 – October 30, 1997) was an American filmmaker, screenwriter, novelist, and journalist whose career spanned pulp fiction writing, frontline reporting, and directing over two dozen low-budget independent films characterized by visceral storytelling, tabloid sensationalism, and unflinching examinations of human extremes in war, crime, and society.[1][2]
Fuller dropped out of school at age 13 to work as a copyboy and later became one of the youngest crime reporters for the New York Journal at 17, honing a hard-boiled style that infused his later screenplays and novels.[3][4] Enlisting after Pearl Harbor, he served as a rifleman with the 16th Infantry Regiment of the 1st Infantry Division across North Africa, Sicily, and Normandy, earning decorations including the Silver Star and Bronze Star for combat valor, experiences that directly shaped his authentic depictions of warfare in films like The Steel Helmet (1951) and The Big Red One (1980).[5][1][6]
Transitioning to Hollywood post-war, Fuller wrote scripts before directing his debut I Shot Jesse James (1949), establishing a signature approach of rapid pacing, stark visuals, and provocative themes—evident in works like Pickup on South Street (1953), Shock Corridor (1963), and White Dog (1982)—often produced on shoestring budgets with total creative control, earning praise for innovation despite commercial inconsistencies and occasional censorship battles over racial and political content.[1][7][8]
Early Life
Childhood and Family
Samuel Michael Fuller was born on August 12, 1912, in Worcester, Massachusetts, to Jewish immigrant parents Benjamin Rabinovitch, originally from Russia, and Rebecca Baum, of Polish-Jewish descent.[9][1] He was one of seven children in a family facing economic precarity typical of early 20th-century immigrant households in industrial New England.[10] Fuller's father died in 1923 when Samuel was 11 years old, plunging the family into financial hardship and prompting a relocation to New York City.[11] In the bustling urban environment of Manhattan, young Fuller contributed to the household by selling newspapers on street corners, a necessity driven by the absence of the primary breadwinner.[11] This early immersion in self-support amid poverty fostered a pragmatic independence, as the family navigated survival without reliance on extended welfare structures. At age 13, Fuller left formal schooling to take a position as a copyboy at the New York Journal, prioritizing immediate income over continued education amid ongoing familial needs.[10] This decision exemplified his emerging rejection of institutional education in favor of experiential learning, shaped by the exigencies of immigrant poverty and the loss of paternal stability, which instilled a lifelong ethos of self-reliance and direct confrontation with real-world demands.[12]Journalism Beginnings
Fuller left school at age 13 to work as a copyboy for the New York Journal, a Hearst-owned tabloid, where he assisted editor Arthur Brisbane and gained initial exposure to the newspaper business.[13] By 1929, at age 17, he transitioned to the New York Evening Graphic, another sensationalist publication known for its graphic crime coverage and "flash" photography of corpses, becoming one of its youngest crime reporters.[11][5] In this role, he pursued stories on murders, police investigations, executions, and urban scandals, often arriving at crime scenes ahead of authorities to interview witnesses and document events directly.[14] His reporting emphasized raw, unfiltered details drawn from on-the-ground observation, such as eyewitness accounts of gangland killings and courtroom dramas during Prohibition-era New York, fostering a style rooted in verifiable facts over speculation.[7] This tabloid environment demanded brevity and impact, training him in economical prose that conveyed causality through sequence of events—e.g., motive leading to act leading to consequence—without ideological overlay.[3] Amid the Great Depression, Fuller extended his pursuits beyond the city, traveling westward across the United States to file stories on labor unrest, vagrancy, and regional crimes, which broadened his empirical grasp of socioeconomic drivers from direct encounters rather than abstracted theory.[7] These itinerant assignments, including stints in Texas and other states, reinforced a perspective attuned to interpersonal and environmental causes in human behavior, derived from repeated immersion in real-time crises.[1]Military Service
World War II Combat
Samuel Fuller enlisted in the United States Army in 1942 at age 30 and, after basic training, joined K Company, 16th Infantry Regiment, First Infantry Division (the "Big Red One").[5] His unit deployed overseas in October 1942, landing at Arzew Beach, Algeria, during Operation Torch on November 8, 1942, where they encountered resistance from Vichy French forces.[5] The regiment fought in subsequent North African battles, including against German forces under Erwin Rommel, contributing to the Axis defeat in Tunisia by May 1943.[5] In July 1943, Fuller's unit participated in the Allied invasion of Sicily (Operation Husky), advancing inland amid fierce fighting against German and Italian defenders, with the 16th Infantry securing key positions during the campaign that lasted until August.[5] Following preparations in England, the division assaulted Omaha Beach on D-Day, June 6, 1944, with Fuller in the third wave; the landing faced devastating German defenses, resulting in thousands of casualties, including piles of bodies and severed limbs amid the chaos of machine-gun fire and obstacles.[5] As a corporal, Fuller advanced under heavy fire, later recounting the psychological shock of the slaughter, where initial waves were nearly annihilated, leaving survivors to navigate blood-soaked sands and the stench of death.[5] The 16th Infantry continued through Normandy, Belgium, and into Germany, enduring the brutal Hürtgen Forest battles in late 1944, marked by dense woods, minefields, and relentless artillery that inflicted high attrition on infantrymen.[5] In May 1945, near the war's end, Fuller's unit liberated Falkenau an der Eger, a subcamp of Flossenbürg concentration camp in Czechoslovakia, on May 9; he documented the scene with a 16mm camera, capturing emaciated prisoners, stacked corpses, and mass graves to preserve unfiltered evidence against future denial.[15] These experiences exposed Fuller to the unvarnished savagery of combat and totalitarian atrocities, reinforcing his conviction that armed confrontation was indispensable to dismantle Nazi oppression, untainted by postwar romanticizations.[16]Medals and Personal Impact
Fuller received the Silver Star, Bronze Star, and Purple Heart for gallantry and wounds sustained during combat with the 16th Infantry Regiment of the 1st Infantry Division.[17][13][18] These honors recognized his service as an infantryman rifleman across campaigns in North Africa, Sicily, and Normandy, including the D-Day assault at Omaha Beach on June 6, 1944, where he advanced under heavy fire.[5] Wounded twice in Europe, Fuller endured frontline engagements that demanded direct confrontation with enemy forces, embodying the raw exigencies of infantry warfare.[11] Fuller's immersion in these battles forged a worldview rooted in the unvarnished empirical realities of human conflict, countering detached pacifist narratives that abstract away the visceral causality of Axis atrocities.[19] On May 9, 1945—one day after VE Day—his unit liberated the Falkenau an der Eger concentration camp in Czechoslovakia, where he filmed 16mm footage (later titled V-E +1) documenting emaciated survivors, stacked corpses, and the systematic dehumanization engineered by Nazi ideology.[17][20] This encounter, described by Fuller as a "profound shock," exposed the engineered brutality possible under totalitarian aggression, instilling a rejection of idealistic denials that minimize such threats as mere policy failures rather than inherent outcomes of unchecked authoritarianism.[20] The personal toll—including comrades' deaths and his own injuries—further cemented Fuller's causal understanding of human nature's capacity for savagery when ideological fanaticism overrides restraint, directly informing his later equation of fascist horrors with parallel totalitarian dangers like communism.[19] Observations of Axis propaganda's role in mobilizing mass violence paralleled for him the mechanisms of other collectivist extremisms, fostering a staunch anti-communist posture grounded not in abstraction but in the tangible evidence of ideological threats' extensions from wartime brutality.[21] This service-derived realism dismissed left-leaning anti-war postures as empirically unmoored, prioritizing confrontation with aggression's root causes over post-hoc moral equivalences that obscure aggressor-victim dynamics.[19]Film Career
Screenwriting and Early Directing
Fuller resumed screenwriting after World War II, contributing the original story to Gangs of the Waterfront (1945), a low-budget crime drama depicting rival gangs battling for control of New York docks.[22] The film, directed by George Blair and produced by Republic Pictures, reflected Fuller's pulp fiction roots with its gritty, sensationalized portrayal of urban underworld violence, drawing from his pre-war journalistic experience covering similar tabloid tales.[23] Dissatisfied with studio alterations to his scripts, such as the handling of his co-written Shockproof (1949) under Douglas Sirk at Columbia, Fuller transitioned to directing to retain artistic control.[1] His directorial debut, I Shot Jesse James (1949), which he also wrote, was produced on a modest budget of approximately $93,000 by independent outfit Lippert Pictures, enabling him to bypass major studio oversight and censorship constraints.[24] Released in March 1949, the film focused on Robert Ford's psychological torment after assassinating Jesse James on April 3, 1882, emphasizing raw human motivations over conventional Western tropes.[25] Fuller's follow-up, The Baron of Arizona (1950), again self-penned and directed, chronicled the real-life 19th-century land fraud scheme of James Reavis, who forged Spanish grants to claim over 12 million acres including most of Arizona.[26] Produced independently with Lippert on a similarly constrained budget, it prioritized historical veracity and audacious scheming—rooted in Fuller's tabloid-sourced narrative style—over polished aesthetics, resulting in a fleet-paced tale that highlighted entrepreneurial cunning amid bureaucratic resistance.[27] These early efforts exemplified Fuller's commitment to low-cost, self-reliant production as a means to preserve uncompromised storytelling against Hollywood's formulaic impositions.[28]Key Productions and Themes
Samuel Fuller's Pickup on South Street (1953), produced by 20th Century Fox with Jules Schermer as producer, featured Richard Widmark as a pickpocket entangled in espionage, alongside Jean Peters and Thelma Ritter, with Fuller handling screenplay and direction.[29] The film marked a breakthrough in Fuller's career for its raw urban authenticity, shot on location in downtown Los Angeles to evoke New York City's underbelly, diverging from studio backlots.[30] House of Bamboo (1955), a 20th Century Fox production in color and CinemaScope, starred Robert Ryan as a crime boss in post-war Tokyo and Robert Stack as an undercover investigator, with screenplay by Harry Kleiner and additional dialogue by Fuller.[31] Filmed entirely on location in Japan with cooperation from U.S. military authorities, it depicted American-Japanese gang dynamics amid occupation-era tensions.[32] The Crimson Kimono (1959), released by Columbia Pictures, centered on two Los Angeles detectives—one Japanese-American (James Shigeta in his screen debut) and one white—investigating a murder witnessed by a stripper, with Victoria Shaw and Glenn Corbett in lead roles; Fuller wrote and directed.[33] Production utilized real locations in Los Angeles' Little Tokyo for street-level realism, capturing the neighborhood's post-relocation demographics after World War II internment.[34] Shock Corridor (1963), produced by Allied Artists, followed a journalist (Peter Breck) feigning insanity to infiltrate a mental hospital for a scoop, co-starring Constance Towers and featuring cameos by character actors as patients; Fuller directed from his own screenplay.[35] The film premiered on September 11, 1963, in New York City after production wrapped under Fuller's independent oversight, allowing uncompromised execution despite low-budget constraints.[35] Fuller's war epic The Big Red One (1980) drew directly from his World War II combat experiences with the U.S. First Infantry Division, chronicling four riflemen and their sergeant (Lee Marvin) across North Africa, Sicily, Normandy, and Germany.[36] The screenplay adapted elements from Fuller's own 1980 novel of the same name, published concurrently with the film's release, emphasizing squad-level survival over grand strategy.[37]Acting Appearances
Fuller made numerous cameo appearances in films by other directors, typically embodying gruff, authoritative figures that mirrored his background as a frontline journalist and infantry veteran. These roles emphasized his persona as a blunt observer of human conflict, eschewing glamorous leads for terse, authentic interjections that conveyed hard-earned realism.[38] In Jean-Luc Godard's Pierrot le Fou (1965), Fuller appeared as himself during a party sequence, articulating a stark philosophy of filmmaking: "A film is like a battleground. Love. Hate. Action. Violence. Death. In one word: emotion."[39] This cameo, delivered in Fuller's raspy voice, captured the directors' shared affinity for visceral, uncompromised cinema, with Godard casting him to invoke American pulp intensity amid the French New Wave's experimentation.[40][41] Wim Wenders featured Fuller as "The American," a menacing gangster, in The American Friend (1977), pairing him with Nicholas Ray in a nod to exiled icons of U.S. independent film.[42] The role's terse authority aligned with Fuller's self-presentation as a no-frills truth-teller, fostering a collaborative respect for narrative grit over polished convention.[43] In Steven Spielberg's 1941 (1979), Fuller portrayed Interceptor Commander Hawkins, a steely military officer barking orders amid wartime chaos, drawing directly from his World War II combat scars to lend credibility to the ensemble's frenzy.[44] Such appearances reinforced Fuller's aversion to heroic archetypes, favoring instead portrayals of weathered sentinels who pierced illusions with factual candor.[45]Literary Contributions
Novels
Fuller began his literary career with pulp fiction novels in the 1930s and 1940s, leveraging his background as a New York crime reporter to craft terse, detail-oriented stories of urban underworlds and moral ambiguity.[46] His early works included Test Tube Baby (1936), a sensational tale of scientific hubris and crime, and The Ape (1940), which depicted gritty criminal enterprises with unvarnished realism derived from firsthand journalistic observations.[46] These novels featured fast-paced plots grounded in causal chains of human greed and violence, avoiding idealized portrayals of lawbreakers in favor of empirical depictions of consequence-driven conflicts.[47] By the mid-1940s, Fuller published Burn, Baby, Burn! (1942) and The Dark Page (1944), the latter centering on a tabloid journalist entangled in corruption and murder, mirroring his own reporting experiences with stark, fact-heavy prose that prioritized verifiable motivations over dramatic embellishment.[47] These pulp efforts, often issued by lowbrow publishers like Godwin, emphasized the raw mechanics of crime—rooted in personal failings and systemic pressures—rather than heroic redemption arcs, reflecting Fuller's commitment to unromanticized causal realism in narrative construction. Though commercially modest, they established his voice as one of journalistic authenticity amid the era's sensationalist fiction.[48] Following the decline of his Hollywood prospects in the 1980s, after disputes over creative control, Fuller wrote Brainquake (completed circa 1985, first published in French in 1993 and English in 2014), a crime thriller about a mob courier plagued by hallucinatory migraines and drawn into betrayal and revenge.[49] Composed during self-imposed exile in Europe, the novel eschewed mainstream outlets to preserve authorial independence, featuring protagonists ensnared in interlocking human frailties—ambition, loyalty, and neurological vulnerability—that propel inexorable conflicts, akin to the deterministic human dynamics in his films.[50] Its delayed release underscored Fuller's prioritization of uncompromised expression over timely commercial success, with prose retaining the clipped intensity of his pulp origins while probing deeper psychological causations.[51]Autobiography and Memoirs
Samuel Fuller's principal autobiographical work, A Third Face: My Tale of Writing, Fighting, and Filmmaking, appeared posthumously in 2002 through Applause Books.[52] The volume recounts his progression from newsboy and crime reporter in 1920s New York—covering events like the 1929 Wall Street Crash and Prohibition-era gang violence—to frontline service as a U.S. Army sergeant in World War II, and onward to scriptwriting, directing, and producing independent films.[3] It incorporates reproductions of personal photographs, wartime dispatches, and archival documents, emphasizing direct eyewitness observations over interpretive narrative.[53] Fuller, who suffered a stroke in 1995 at age 83, devoted his final two years to dictating and refining the manuscript, prioritizing raw, unembellished details drawn from diaries, letters, and memory to preserve causal sequences of events as he experienced them.[54] Assisted minimally by his wife, Christa Lang Fuller, and editor Jerome Henry Rudes, the book eschews heavy ghostwriting or sanitization, reflecting Fuller's insistence on authorial control to avoid distortions common in collaborative biographies.[55] This approach yielded a text noted for its tabloid-like candor, including specifics on combat trauma—such as leading patrols in North Africa and Normandy—and Hollywood negotiations, earning the 2002 Los Angeles Times Book Review award for best non-fiction.[52] Excerpts from Fuller's World War II notebooks, integrated into A Third Face, offer terse, empirical logs of infantry engagements, such as the 1st Infantry Division's advance through Sicily in July 1943 and the liberation of Falkenau concentration camp in May 1945, underscoring logistical realities and personal risks without romanticization.[53] No additional standalone memoirs or travelogues by Fuller have been published, though the autobiography's Manhattan vignettes detail his early urban reporting circuits along streets like Park Row, capturing the era's socioeconomic pressures through specific incidents like interviewing executed criminals' families.[3]Artistic Style
Directorial Techniques
Fuller's directorial techniques prioritized raw efficiency over polished artistry, drawing from his pre-war journalism career to emulate the punchy immediacy of tabloid reporting and newsreels. He favored rapid cuts and dynamic camera movements—such as darting dollies in Park Row (1952) or tracks in Forty Guns (1957)—to propel action with journalistic haste, avoiding languid setups in favor of visceral momentum.[1] Signature optical zooms within long takes provided abrupt emphasis on details, as in the wristwatch close-up amid carnage in The Big Red One (1980), allowing seamless narrative progression while heightening tension through practical optical shifts rather than elaborate staging.[1] Visual framing often incorporated tabloid-inspired elements, treating close-ups as explosive "headlines" that sensationalize key images, a direct carryover from Fuller's reporting days at the Evening Graphic (1929–1931), where lurid crime stories demanded stark, attention-grabbing composition.[56] Bold angles in films like Underworld U.S.A. (1961) mimicked front-page typography, integrating graphic text or signage into shots to underscore immediacy without narrative detour.[1] Constrained by low budgets, Fuller maximized ingenuity in resource-scarce productions; Fixed Bayonets! (1951), made for $100,000, relied on authentic military props and terse dialogue to simulate Korean War realism, eschewing costly sets for on-location efficiency and stock elements where needed to amplify combat intensity.[1] Sound design emphasized unfiltered sensory assault, particularly in war films, with abrupt gunfire and explosive effects in The Steel Helmet (1951) and Merrill's Marauders (1962) crafted to replicate the disorienting chaos of battle, grounded in Fuller's frontline recollections from World War II rather than studio gloss.[1]Core Themes and Motifs
Fuller's films recurrently emphasize individualism and outsider perspectives, portraying protagonists as misfits who assert personal agency against societal pressures or institutional conformity, reflecting his own trajectory from crime reporter to combat veteran.[1][7] Characters often derive moral clarity from direct experience rather than abstract doctrines, prioritizing self-reliant action in narratives that favor empirical outcomes over ideological collectives.[1] This motif appears in works like I Shot Jesse James (1949), where the assassin Robert Ford becomes an eternal outcast driven by personal compulsion, and Run of the Arrow (1957), depicting an Irish-American deserter's integration into Sioux society through individual adaptation.[1] Journalism emerges as a motif of truth-seeking amid corruption, with reporters embodying relentless pursuit of facts against institutional deceit or sensationalism. In Park Row (1952), editor Phineas Mitchell reveres journalistic integrity, drawing from historical figures like Horace Greeley to combat rival papers' ethical lapses.[1] Similarly, Shock Corridor (1963) features journalist Johnny Barrett infiltrating a mental institution to unearth concealed truths, underscoring the profession's role in piercing veils of official narrative.[1] War functions not as undifferentiated horror but as a crucible forging character through visceral trials, where soldiers confront mortality and camaraderie to emerge with hardened resolve. The Steel Helmet (1951) illustrates this via Sergeant Zack's evolution amid a diverse squad's defense against overwhelming odds, blending combat's brutality with moral introspection.[1] The Big Red One (1980), informed by Fuller's World War II service in the 1st Infantry Division, traces four riflemen across North Africa, Sicily, and Normandy, depicting war's transformative impact on their humanity via authentic frontline dynamics.[1][57] Racial dynamics unfold through personal confrontations and integrated interactions, eschewing collectivist preaching for observable human exchanges, as in war films featuring minority soldiers whose competence challenges prejudices via shared peril. The Steel Helmet includes a Black medic and Japanese-American sergeant in a makeshift unit, echoing Fuller's military encounters with diverse troops and highlighting individual merit over group abstractions.[1][58] Fuller's rejection of collectivism favors personal agency, evident in Pickup on South Street (1953), where petty criminals subvert espionage not for patriotism but self-preservation, and Underworld U.S.A. (1961), prioritizing vendetta-driven justice against systemic crime.[1] This approach grounds morality in causal realities of action and consequence, as protagonists like Kelly in The Naked Kiss (1964) reclaim autonomy through decisive, experience-based choices.[1]Political Views and Controversies
Anti-Communism and Patriotism
Samuel Fuller's patriotism stemmed from his frontline service in World War II as an infantryman with the 1st Infantry Division's 16th Regiment, where he fought in campaigns across North Africa, Sicily, Normandy (including D-Day), and into Germany, culminating in the liberation of the Falkenau concentration camp in May 1945. For his combat valor, he received the Silver Star, Bronze Star with Valor device, and Purple Heart, experiences that instilled a profound respect for American resilience against authoritarian threats and informed his cinematic emphasis on national survival through individual grit and collective duty.[19][6] This wartime realism underpinned Fuller's anti-communist outlook, evident in films portraying ideological subversion as an existential peril requiring vigilant countermeasures. In China Gate (1957), he directed a story set in 1954 French Indochina, where a team of mercenaries, including an American explosives expert, infiltrates and destroys a massive Viet Minh communist munitions depot, framing U.S.-aligned intervention as a pragmatic bulwark against expansionist aggression that echoed his view of causal threats from totalitarian regimes. The film opens with Nat King Cole's narration decrying communism's "rape of humanity," underscoring Fuller's belief in its inherent barbarism, drawn from empirical observations of ideological warfare rather than abstract moralizing.[59][60] Similarly, Pickup on South Street (1953) eschews didacticism for raw confrontation, centering on a New York pickpocket who steals microfilm containing atomic secrets from communist spies, forcing a reckoning with personal loyalty amid infiltration; Fuller positioned this as instinctive patriotism trumping ideological indifference, critiquing apathy as enabling subversion in a manner that provoked State Department scrutiny yet affirmed empirical defenses against internal threats. His Korean War film The Steel Helmet (1951) further illustrates anti-communist resolve, depicting outnumbered U.S. troops repelling North Korean forces in a ruined Buddhist temple, with dialogue probing psychological tactics like brainwashing—prompting FBI investigations that Fuller rebutted by citing his combat record against totalitarianism. These works collectively reject utopian internationalism, prioritizing hard-won national sovereignty forged in blood over conciliatory illusions.[61][19]
Racial Themes and White Dog Dispute
Samuel Fuller's films frequently addressed racial prejudice through direct confrontations with societal realities, as seen in Shock Corridor (1963), where a journalist infiltrates a mental asylum and encounters a Black patient subjected to virulent racist abuse by white inmates, reflecting empirical observations of institutional segregation and hatred persisting into the early 1960s.[62][63] This depiction drew from Fuller's firsthand reporting experiences, portraying racism not as abstract ideology but as a causal force manifesting in verbal and physical violence within confined environments mirroring broader American society.[64] Earlier works like The Crimson Kimono (1959) similarly explored interracial relationships and bias empirically, challenging viewers with unfiltered dialogues on ethnic tensions without moralizing overlays.[65] Fuller's most contentious engagement with race came in White Dog (1982), adapted from Romain Gary's 1970 novel about a white female entertainer who adopts a stray dog unknowingly trained by white supremacists to attack Black people, leading to attempts at deconditioning by a Black animal trainer played by Paul Winfield.[66] The film posits racism as a conditioned behavior akin to Pavlovian response, empirically demonstrating through the dog's relapses how deeply ingrained hatred resists reversal, emphasizing causal mechanisms of indoctrination over innate traits.[67] Fuller intended this animal metaphor to expose the persistence of racial animus in post-civil rights America, with the Black trainer's arc underscoring human efforts against systemic prejudice, framing the narrative as a critique of racism's psychological transmission rather than its endorsement.[66][68] Paramount Pictures shelved the U.S. release in 1982 following protests from the NAACP, who viewed the premise as potentially reinforcing stereotypes by depicting a "racist dog," despite test screenings and Fuller's assurances of its anti-racist intent; the studio feared backlash from civil rights groups interpreting the conditioning metaphor as trivializing or excusing human bigotry.[69][67] In defense, Fuller argued the film unequivocally condemns racism—stating in interviews that "if I were Black I'd love it, and if I were a racist I'd hate it"—pointing to its portrayal of the dog's attacks on innocents and the trainer's futile but dedicated deprogramming as evidence of prejudice's destructiveness, not normalization.[68] This dispute highlighted tensions between Fuller's causal-realist approach, rooted in observable behavioral conditioning, and ideological critiques that prioritized surface offense over the film's empirical warning about racism's durability, with limited U.S. distribution until 1991 underscoring how preemptive censorship by studios and advocacy groups sidelined works challenging simplistic narratives.[70][71]Critiques of Censorship and Hollywood Norms
Fuller frequently confronted the Motion Picture Production Code, enforced from 1934 to 1968, which mandated moralistic portrayals and prohibited explicit depictions of vice. His screenplay for Pickup on South Street (1952) was submitted to the Hays Office in August 1952 for approval, facing objections over its sympathetic thief protagonist and references to communism.[72] Such regulatory hurdles exemplified Fuller's broader resistance to institutional demands for narrative sanitization, which he saw as distorting factual human behavior in favor of idealized consensus. To evade studio oversight and code-compliant alterations, Fuller self-financed Park Row (1952) using $200,000 of his own funds, producing the film through his independent company without major interference.[1] This strategy allowed retention of gritty, unvarnished elements drawn from his journalistic background, contrasting Hollywood's preference for polished, risk-averse productions. By the mid-1960s, as code enforcement loosened, Fuller persisted in boundary-pushing content, as in The Naked Kiss (1964), where prostitution featured prominently without redemptive euphemisms, challenging residual norms against candid vice portrayal.[73] Fuller regarded mainstream Hollywood practices as conformist mechanisms that suppressed direct engagement with societal realities, advocating low-budget independent ventures as countermeasures to enable unfiltered storytelling.[74] His tabloid-derived aesthetic prioritized sensational yet empirical depictions over studio-driven ideological smoothing, positioning autonomy as vital against an industry prone to self-imposed ideological filters that obscured causal drivers of events.[75] This stance aligned with his production of inexpensive genre films that profited modestly but critiqued polished illusions, favoring visceral truth over collective narrative dictates.[76]Later Years
Final Projects
Fuller returned to directing in 1980 with The Big Red One, a semi-autobiographical war film depicting the experiences of a U.S. Army rifle squad, including the director's own World War II service with the 1st Infantry Division ("The Big Red One"). The project, which he wrote and directed on a $4.5 million budget provided by Lorimar Productions, starred Lee Marvin as the grizzled sergeant leading four young soldiers through campaigns in North Africa, Sicily, Omaha Beach, and Germany, emphasizing the dehumanizing absurdities of combat over heroic narratives. Originally released in a 111-minute theatrical cut on July 18, 1980, it later saw a 2004 reconstruction restoring nearly 50 minutes of footage, highlighting Fuller's raw, episodic style drawn from personal frontline journalism.[77][78] Facing Hollywood's reluctance to fund further projects amid his independent reputation and advancing age—Fuller was 68 at the time—he pursued opportunities abroad, directing Thieves After Dark (Les Voleurs de la nuit) in 1984 for French producer Ariel Zeitoun. This low-budget crime thriller, shot in Paris, follows a young couple (Véronique Jannot and Bobby Di Cicco) drawn into robbery and flight after a fatal altercation at an employment agency, blending Bonnie and Clyde-esque romance with urban desperation. Premiering at the 34th Berlin International Film Festival on February 17, 1984, it marked Fuller's adaptation to European financing after U.S. studio rejections, though critical reception noted its uneven pacing and dubbed dialogue as compromises of exile production.[79] Fuller's late efforts included pitches for sequels, such as to his 1959 film The Crimson Kimono, and original scripts like treatments exploring urban intrigue and historical intrigue, but industry gatekeepers deemed them unviable due to his outlier status and perceived commercial risks. Undeterred, he sustained productivity through scriptwriting and treatments documented in his 1996 memoir A Third Face, rejecting retirement as a capitulation to obsolescence; at 84, he quipped in interviews that ceasing work equated to "dying early." These unproduced works, numbering over a dozen by the 1980s, reflected his persistent tabloid-inflected storytelling, even as age and blacklisting echoes limited realizations.[10]Death
Samuel Fuller died of natural causes on October 30, 1997, at his home in the Hollywood Hills section of Los Angeles, California, at the age of 85.[80][11] He was survived by his wife, Christa Lang Fuller, whom he had married in 1965, and their daughter, Samantha. In the period leading up to his death, Fuller remained active in cinema, making a cameo appearance in Wim Wenders' The End of Violence (1997), which highlighted his persistent involvement in projects despite advanced age and health decline.[2] His final days were spent with family, consistent with accounts of his close-knit personal life amid ongoing creative pursuits. Contemporary obituaries lauded Fuller's tenacious, independent filmmaking style—rooted in his experiences as a World War II combat correspondent and tabloid journalist—as a source of gritty authenticity that influenced subsequent generations of directors, though some noted its raw, uncompromised edge clashed with prevailing Hollywood sensibilities.[11][81] The Directors Guild of America organized a memorial event shortly after his passing to honor his combative legacy in low-budget, visceral cinema.[80]Legacy
Influence on Cinema
Samuel Fuller's raw, journalistic approach to filmmaking, characterized by pulp-infused energy and unpolished realism, profoundly shaped subsequent directors across cinematic movements. Jean-Luc Godard, a key figure in the French New Wave, featured Fuller in a cameo in Pierrot le Fou (1965), where Fuller famously defines film as "a battleground... love, hate, action, violence, death... in one word, emotion," signaling cross-Atlantic admiration for Fuller's visceral style.[74] Martin Scorsese dedicated segments of his 1995 British Film Institute documentary series to Fuller's works, highlighting their impact on his own narrative intensity and street-level authenticity.[82] Quentin Tarantino, citing Fuller among his top influences, praised him as "the king of making war films" for blending screenwriting grit with on-screen dynamism, evident in Tarantino's own dialogue-driven pulp narratives.[83] Fuller's signature techniques, such as inserting bold newspaper headlines to propel plots and mimic tabloid sensationalism, permeated indie and exploitation cinema, fostering a direct, attention-seizing visual rhetoric that prioritized impact over subtlety.[14] This method, drawn from his crime-reporting background, encouraged filmmakers to treat cinema as an urgent dispatch rather than polished artifice, influencing low-budget productions that adopted similar graphic jolts for narrative economy.[84] In war cinema, Fuller's firsthand combat experience lent unsparing authenticity to depictions in films like The Steel Helmet (1951) and The Big Red One (1980), serving as precursors to Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan (1998). Spielberg explicitly named The Steel Helmet among key WWII influences for its gritty combat realism, while The Big Red One's Omaha Beach sequence prefigured Spielberg's visceral D-Day opening through its emphasis on soldier psychology and chaotic verisimilitude over heroic gloss.[85][86] Fuller's outsider status as a self-financed maverick championed an ethos of accessible, anti-elitist filmmaking, countering the period's auteur reverence with pragmatic, story-first realism that valued emotional punch and journalistic truth over theoretical abstraction.[87] This perspective resonated with independent directors like Jim Jarmusch, who echoed Fuller's unpretentious vigor in minimalist works, positioning Fuller as a bridge between pulp origins and modern indie irreverence.[88]Critical Reassessments
Early scholarly assessments often relegated Fuller's films to the realm of B-movie sensationalism, critiquing their tabloid aesthetics and pulp sensibilities as evidence of stylistic crudity rather than deliberate artistry.[89] This view persisted through the mid-20th century, with critics like Manny Farber acknowledging Fuller's raw vigor but confining him to genre margins without probing deeper structural intents.[89] Reevaluation gained traction in the 1970s amid the auteur theory's influence from French New Wave directors, who celebrated Fuller's uncompromised vision and tabloid energy as proto-modernist breakthroughs. Analyses in publications like Senses of Cinema underscore this shift, portraying Fuller's kinetic pacing, authentic war depictions drawn from personal combat experience, and confrontational themes as hallmarks of an independent cinematic force unbound by studio polish.[1] These perspectives elevated films previously dismissed as schlock, emphasizing empirical stylistic choices—such as abrupt cuts and on-location shooting—that prioritized causal immediacy over narrative refinement.[74] Lisa Dombrowski's 2008 monograph The Films of Samuel Fuller marks a pivotal scholarly milestone, drawing on production archives to dissect overlooked causal linkages in Fuller's oeuvre, including how individual agency intersects with societal pressures in ways unfiltered by prevailing ideological lenses.[90] Dombrowski's work counters earlier dismissals by evidencing Fuller's intentional subversion of genre conventions to expose totalitarian undercurrents, a focus often obscured in academia's left-leaning frameworks that projected contemporary biases onto his unapologetic patriotism.[91] Subsequent right-leaning interpretations reinforce this anti-totalitarian core, arguing that Fuller's narratives—rooted in firsthand WWII observations—debunk collectivist projections by affirming individual resilience against ideological conformity, a realism sidelined in mainstream critiques prone to equating nationalism with authoritarianism.[75] Such reassessments prioritize verifiable biographical and thematic consistencies, revealing how institutional biases in film studies delayed recognition of Fuller's prescient causal realism in depicting power's corrupting mechanics.[92]Recent Revivals
In 2020, Sony Pictures Home Entertainment released The Samuel Fuller Collection, a seven-disc box set compiling seven of Fuller's early films from his time at Columbia Pictures, including restored versions of It Happened in Hollywood (1937), Adventure in Sahara (1938), Power of the Press (1943), Shockproof (1949), Scandal Sheet (1952), The Crimson Kimono (1959), and Underworld U.S.A. (1961), accompanied by bonus materials such as new interviews with Fuller's widow Christa Fuller and filmmakers like Curtis Hanson.[93] This release highlighted Fuller's formative pulp-noir sensibilities and journalistic roots, drawing renewed attention to his pre-directorial screenwriting and unpolished genre experiments through high-definition transfers that revealed technical details previously obscured in degraded prints.[93] Digital restorations of individual titles have further facilitated empirical analysis of Fuller's stylistic hallmarks, such as rapid montage and stark lighting, with Criterion's 4K UHD edition of Pickup on South Street (1953) in 2021 providing unprecedented clarity to its Cold War-era subway pickpocketing sequences and ideological confrontations.[94] These upgrades, leveraging advanced scanning of original negatives, have enabled scholars to dissect Fuller's deliberate "crudeness"—low-angle shots and abrupt cuts—as intentional tools for visceral impact rather than budgetary constraints, underscoring his resistance to Hollywood's sanitized norms.[94] Revivals of controversial works like White Dog (1982) have affirmed Fuller's intent to confront racial conditioning head-on, as evidenced by university and festival screenings that reevaluate the film beyond its 1982 suppression by Paramount over NAACP objections. A 2021 screening at Duke University's Screen/Society series emphasized the picture's restoration to canonical status, portraying it as a stark allegory for behavioral reprogramming drawn from Romain Gary's novel, with Paul Winfield's trainer character embodying Fuller's theme of redeemable prejudice through empirical deconditioning efforts.[95] Such events counter earlier bans by focusing on verifiable plot mechanics—the dog's Pavlovian attacks and failed exorcism attempts—validating Fuller's unyielding depiction of human-canine parallels in bias without concessions to contemporary sensitivities.[95] Articles in 2023 revisited Fuller's 2002 autobiography A Third Face: My Tale of Writing, Fighting, and Filmmaking, extracting overlooked details on his World War II combat footage and tabloid reporting that inform his films' raw causality, such as the Falkenau concentration camp liberation influencing Verboten! (1959).[10] These analyses, prioritizing Fuller's firsthand accounts over mediated interpretations, have spotlighted his causal realism—linking personal frontline empiricism to cinematic provocations like interracial violence in The Crimson Kimono—fostering appreciation for his preemptive challenges to postwar pieties.[10]Works
Filmography
The following table enumerates Samuel Fuller's primary feature films as director, listed chronologically by release year, with associated studios where verifiable.[2][96]| Year | Title | Studio/Distributor |
|---|---|---|
| 1949 | I Shot Jesse James | Monogram Pictures |
| 1950 | The Baron of Arizona | Lippert Pictures |
| 1951 | The Steel Helmet | Lippert Pictures |
| 1951 | Fixed Bayonets! | 20th Century Fox |
| 1952 | Park Row | United Artists |
| 1953 | Pickup on South Street | 20th Century Fox |
| 1954 | Hell and High Water | 20th Century Fox |
| 1955 | House of Bamboo | 20th Century Fox |
| 1957 | Run of the Arrow | Globe Enterprises |
| 1957 | China Gate | 20th Century Fox |
| 1957 | Forty Guns | 20th Century Fox |
| 1959 | Verboten! | RKO Radio Pictures |
| 1959 | The Crimson Kimono | Globe Enterprises |
| 1961 | Underworld U.S.A. | Columbia Pictures |
| 1962 | Merrill's Marauders | American International Pictures |
| 1963 | Shock Corridor | Allied Artists |
| 1964 | The Naked Kiss | Allied Artists |
| 1969 | Shark! | Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer |
| 1972 | Dead Pigeon on Beethoven Street | Independent (German production) |
| 1980 | The Big Red One | United Artists |
| 1982 | White Dog | Paramount Pictures |
Bibliography
Fuller wrote eleven novels, primarily pulp fiction in the crime and adventure genres during his early career as a journalist and screenwriter.[100] Fiction:- Burn, Baby, Burn (1935), a pulp novel published under the name Sam Fuller.[101]
- Test Tube Baby (1936), early pulp fiction exploring sensational themes.[101]
- Make Up and Kiss (1938), a pulp romance-crime story.[101]
- The Dark Page (1944), a noir novel adapted into a screenplay.[102]
- 144 Piccadilly (1971), a later thriller.[102]
- Dead Pigeon on Beethoven Street (1974), a crime novel.[102]
- The Big Red One (1980; reissued 2005), a novelization drawing from wartime experiences.[103]
- Quint's World (1988), an adventure novel.[104]
- Brainquake (2014, posthumous publication by Hard Case Crime), an unpublished manuscript from the 1980s released decades after Fuller's death.[105]
- A Third Face: My Tale of Writing, Fighting, and Filmmaking (2002), Fuller's autobiography compiled from notes, interviews, and manuscripts by his wife Christa Lang Fuller and editor Jerome Henry Rudes; published by Alfred A. Knopf on November 5, 2002, spanning 608 pages.[55][106]