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Samuel Fuller: |
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“PRIMITIVE DIES”. This was the bald headline that disgraced the
tiny item in an Australian newspaper declaring the passing in October 1997 of
Samuel Fuller – accompanied, of course, by a mugshot of the filmmaker chomping
on a cigar. How does a great, influential director get to be encapsulated, by
some copywriter who may have known little and seen less of his work, as a primitive? A primitive like Ed Wood (deranged Z movie bungler), or a primitive like Steven Spielberg (unreflective
entertainer for the people)? Primitive like Robert Aldrich (classical action,
violence, machismo) or like Gaspar Noé (modern confrontation, provocation,
sensation)?
To answer these questions properly would probably require a
book-length detour through the fields of cultural studies, reception studies, Pierre
Bourdieu-informed accounts of social taste and distinction, comparative
histories of American and European cinema, and – last but far from least – the
variegated national histories of film criticism itself. The effort would not be
wasted. For the artist who dies a primitive is an artist unknown, undigested, a
mystery hidden under stereotype, cliché and snobbish posturing.
Most of us who love cinema think we know something about “Sam” (as
we familiarly called him, but not how he signed himself), born 1912. We know
that he stood against a wall during a luridly filtered party scene in Jean-Luc Godard’s Pierrot le fou (1965) and
told Jean-Paul Belmondo (and us) that film is “like a
battleground. It’s love, hate, action, violence, death … in one word, emotions” – even if we haven’t yet seen Pierrot le fou. We know that his films display a tabloid aesthetic (inspired by his
youthful days in the newspaper game) and wallop a kino-fist; that they are, above all, dynamic, kinetic, visceral. A
Pop Art guy before his time.
From A Personal Journey with
Martin Scorsese Through American Movies (1995) – which leans heavily on the
work of Michael Henry Wilson, see his epic final tome À la porte du Paradis (2014) – we know about the bold long takes,
the wild and woolly camera movements, the disorienting close-ups (the first of
which was the first shot in his first feature, I Shot Jesse James [1949]), the starkly angular, comic-book
compositions, the furious montages. And we know who he has influenced, those
contemporary directors, from Jim Jarmusch to Leos Carax, who cite him lovingly.
And we’ve also heard – far too often – about the supposedly bad B movie acting (delivered by Gene Barry
or Constance Towers), the excruciating dialogue alternating heavy-handed slogans and hard-boiled retorts, the lurid
plots. (My vain attempt, once upon a time, to explain the serious premise of White Dog [1982] – I think I called it “a
metaphor for racist socialisation” – to a Literature Professor from University
of Sydney led only to his superior mirth, and my peeved discomfort.) The unreal clichés and stereotypes, lordy! (Pointer for 21st century
social-media readers: in this paragraph, I am being bitingly ironic.)
We know he had something to do with politics, and that political
statements are uttered in his films – but whether he was arch-conservative or anarchist,
or something weirdly liberal in-between, seems to be a murky call, especially
if you haven’t yet seen the films for yourself.
By the way, I don’t mean that film-seeing remark as a lofty rebuke
from a cinephilic ivory tower: one of the principal reasons there has been such
a fog around Fuller is that, in many times and places, his films have mostly remained
very hard to see, on big or small screens. I myself had to wait 25 years for an
opportunity to see the hallowed titles Park
Row (1952) – a celebration of the newspaper industry, and Fuller’s personal
favourite – and Fixed Bayonets! (1951), one of his many projects (across film, novels and TV) devoted to the various
wars of the 20th century.
As a 1970s teenager, I depended on broadcast TV to catch titles
like Underworld U.S.A. (1961). Through
the 1980s, VHS never served Fuller terribly well; DVD and Blu-ray have subsequently
done a much better job, promoting Pickup
on South Street (1953), House of
Bamboo (1955), Shock Corridor (1963)
and The Naked Kiss (1964) to their
richly deserved cult status. (I even got to do an audio commentary for Eureka on Fixed Bayonets! in 2016, re-released
as part of the Fuller at Fox box set
in 2019.) But some, such as the remarkable Run
of the Arrow (1957) and most of his late works of the ‘80s and ‘90s, are
still elusive. Others, including The
Crimson Kimono (1959) and China Gate (1957), are only now revealing their riches to those who weren’t able to catch
them 50 or 60 years ago.
Fuller is a filmmaker who – more than any other filmmaker – calls
forth pithy encapsulations. In their massive 50 ans de cinema américain (1995), Jean-Pierre Coursodon and
Bertrand Tavernier (who both passed away in, respectively, December 2020 and
March 2021) briefly consider Christian Viviani’s suggestive formulation – “by
pushing the ridiculous just a little too far, he attains poetry” – and end up
reversing it: by pushing poetry just a little too far, he attains the
ridiculous. (1) Criticism surely needs its encapsulations flung back and forth
in the course of debate and education; but, in the case of Fuller, the summary
verdicts for or against tend to
replace actual, in-depth analytical work on the films themselves.
Is no judgment on Fuller, positive or negative, celebratory or
condemnatory, free from some loaded judgement implying an elaborate and
unstated system of social taste? The cinematic moves that look primitive to
some in Forty Guns (1957) seem to
others virtuosic – I vote with the latter verdict. This blurry situation is
exacerbated by the fact that “Sam” – again, more than any other director – has
been sliced up very differently by successive schools of criticism, creating a
monstrous series of incommensurable Fullers. In one of the finest essays in the
annals of English-language criticism – with certainly one of the best titles,
“Tough Nuts to Crack” – Ronnie Scheib (1944-2015) began a study of Shock Corridor with this handy breakdown
of the terrain.
For the Cro-Magnites,
Fuller is the great American primitive, swinging through the trees with a
camera between his toes – he may have a pea brain but he sure got big eyes –
and rhythm. For the outlying Solar Plexites, Fuller’s a down-home, funky
director, as American as violence and cheesecake. For the Aesthetes, he’s a
poetic film noir auteur, a modernist
– they saw him in Pierrot le fou and
scrambled off to see his films. And, by gosh, there they were: recurrent
themes, Brechtian distanciation, jump cuts, dislocation of sound and image, all
you could ask for in an authentic American Artefact. For the Moralists, Fuller
is either a Nasty Fascist or a Misunderstood Liberal. (2)
Fuller, after he was discovered and hailed by critics, stuck close
to film culture. He gave numerous interviews, warmly acknowledged those
commentators who had given his career a hand, generously attended retrospective
events and film festivals. But Fuller was also (against his will) frozen within
the rather coarse-grained characterisations that these successive champions
elaborated. At the beginning, in the early 1950s, there was the minority report
offered by Manny Farber, who praised Fuller among those post-1940s filmmakers
who find their “best stride in a culture-free atmosphere that allows a director
to waste his and the audience’s time”, calling fond attention to the “episodic,
spastically slow and fast" rhythm of the work, its “scepticism and energy”.
(3)
Seven years later, more influentially, there was the enthusiasm of
Luc Moullet in Cahiers du cinéma, who
praised Fuller’s camera movements on the grounds that they are “fortunately,
totally gratuitous: it is in terms of the emotive power of the movement that
the scene is organised”. (4) This notion of Fuller as an essentially inorganic, bits-and-pieces filmmaker,
devoted to a cinema of the flourish and moments of excess, has ruled many
appreciations since, including those of Scorsese (who eulogises the way a body
slams into a wall and the camera movement picks up the energy of the blow) and
Quentin Tarantino (as narrated in the documentary The Typewriter, the Rifle and the Movie Camera [Adam Simon, 1996]).
Nowadays, when such flourishes in cinema are legion, even routine
(see, for instance, the work of Edgar Wright), we can easily overlook what they
must have once meant to modernists like Farber and Moullet: in the context of a
more conventionalised and rigid mainstream, Fuller’s stylistic tics were the
first signs of a personal cinema
suddenly possible within the System – hence Moullet’s regard for these
“instinctive … rough sketches” revealing “the force of the instantaneous and of
the unfinished”. (5)
Later, in a remarkable historic conjunction, British film culture
in the late 1960s and early ‘70s showed its love for good old Sam by producing
three books in as many years: an Edinburgh Film Festival anthology, plus
studies by Phil Hardy and Nicholas Garnham. (6) The last of these tends more
toward a socio-political perspective than a purely aesthetic one (with Fuller
positioned somewhere between the ideological myopia of Old Hollywood and the radical
reportage offered by the global New Waves), but the first two books issue
squarely from the heady excitement of a structuralist-textualist moment in
British film culture.
Here, Fuller’s movies are dissolved into one great corpus and
become a churning Sargasso Sea of oppositions and antinomies, contradictions
and reversals, striking images and juxtapositions. (See my introduction to a
reprint of Sam Rohdie on House of Bamboo in 1969 here.) No movie in his career emerges as better executed or more vividly
realised than any other – such evaluative pretensions of a Leavisite period
having been left behind in the wild rush to Paris – and all partake of the same
exhilarating Fuller-effect. Which is not an entirely false impression, but all
the same …
It’s truthful to the extent that no Fuller film is entirely bereft
of some interest, some idea, some moment that is captivating on one level or
another. But his career is uneven, as
even the most diehard fans would have to now admit. Some are more like didactic
pamphlets than fully or convincingly dramatised movies – for example, that curious
patchwork of fiction and documentary concerning the rise of a neo-Nazi youth
movement, Verboten! (1958). Merrill’s Marauders (1962) fits the structural template of the Fuller War Movie down to a tee, but
it’s hard to get excited about in isolation, without the buzz of pro-Fuller
cinephile rhetoric heightening the significance and impact of stray good
scenes. Dead Pigeon on Beethoven Street (1973) is his most obviously strained, quasi-Godardian effort at pleasing his
European aficionados – going fatally further in this direction than other ‘50s
contemporaries like Aldrich, Frank Tashlin, Nicholas Ray or even Alfred Hitchcock,
whose work shifted in its pitch (not entirely happily) after it had been
acclaimed, feted and reinterpreted abroad.
Curiously, when even a whiff of so-called “production values”
moves in, the mitigating critical buzz disappears fast – as is the case when
watching the mediocre Hell and High Water (1954). Fuller is firmly fixed in the popular filmgoing imagination – however
unfairly – as a King of the Bs, which is already what Farber was happy to see
him stay back in 1952. This is why the small-scale of White Dog (1982) was more immediately embraced by embattled
cinephile critics than the grander canvas of The Big Red One (1980) – although
passing time, and especially the appearance of a restored/enhanced version, has
revealed the latter to be the richer and more deeply lasting work.
So what makes Fuller a great director – beyond, that is, the myth
and the hype? There are at least ten extraordinary films in his career: how
many manage even half that number? Fuller’s best work attained its combustible
powers in the ‘50s, in the company of a new generation that included Aldrich,
Richard Brooks and Ray. These auteurs can be thought as melodramatists, but not
in the vein of Douglas Sirk or Vincente Minnelli who mined the “feminine” genre
of the domestic melodrama to some similar ends in the same period. Fuller is on
the side of action-melodrama or, as so many critics down the decades have
approvingly described it, lyrical violence.
His films were part of a loose movement that upped the ante on
violence and tension, heightened a certain noir romanticism (the individual against society, lovers on the run … ) and explored
new forms of psychological characterisation. Fuller’s films are all about
drives, impulses, emotional states that are imprinted on the human being as
traces of “ideological” socialisation (although ideology is never a simple
thing in his work) – as much as they issue from within the hearts, minds and
guts of individuals. All Fuller’s screen creatures are divided and twisted (the
most oft-cited emblematic character being the demented black man who shouts KKK
slogans in Shock Corridor): it is the
clash of inner and outer states that fuel his narratives and shape the actions
– and also, as a by-product, equalise the genders. These characters hammer out
their problems by bashing themselves against each other and the world – hence
the intense, even obsessive physicality of this cinema, and (as in every type
of melodrama) its lurid, expressionistic taste for grotesque bodily metaphors
of social conditions (eg., the obese criminal capitalist poolside in Underworld U.S.A.).
Although it sounds like a slightly old-fashioned description
nowadays, Fuller’s films embody and exhibit ideological contradiction – but in
a game, vivid, virtuosic, frequently perverse way. (Underworld U.S.A., for example, was made to show how organised crime
took taxes from government – which “made me very happy”, Fuller said – and how
someone could use the FBI as a tool of revenge: “I thought it would be very
funny”.) (7) His tales of identity-in-flux – especially Run of the Arrow – are strikingly prescient of what gets called
nowadays intersectional and/or postcolonial cinema.
Fuller’s films – with their heterogeneous mixes of footage, their
hallucinatory dream/fantasy sequences (see Shock
Corridor and The Naked Kiss, the
latter a likely influence on David Lynch), their plot trajectories of reporting and
transmission, their clashes of sound and image – are also prophetic of the
heady, reality-twisting role of media in our modern world. According to Scheib:
What TV homogenises,
deadens, disconnects radically and connects trivially, Fuller electrifies,
forcing his audience to confront the impossible juxtaposition of absolutes, of
consciousnesses that cannot, yet do, share the same frame, and the multiplicity
of absent syntaxes which could articulate their coexistence and their
consecutivity. (8)
But where Fuller is definitely not a prototype of postmodernism is in his insistence on a few absolute values,
values that are the pumping heart of his cinema. Perversity and amorality may
be plentiful, but this storyteller will not abide injustice, hypocrisy (“getting
involved in something emotionally and doing nothing about it”), (9) or the
corruption of innocence. Underworld U.S.A., The Naked Kiss and The Big Red One give us the impression
that nothing was more sentimentally sacred to Fuller than childhood, and
nothing more despicably evil than its desecration.
Thanks to tireless researchers who have trailed through studio
archives and interviewed surviving crew members, we have some idea now exactly
what Hitchcock, Ray or Fritz Lang actually did in the process of directing a
movie – how they worked on the script and pre-production, how they staged and
re-shaped a scene on the set, how they edited and completed their work. With
Fuller we (as yet) know virtually nothing of this. Like most directors, he
never talked about the nitty-gritty of his filmmaking. Everything was
aphorisms, broad strokes, spontaneous advice to young, aspiring filmmakers –
such as counselling that the start of any movie has to give the viewer a
hard-on. In a characteristically tub-thumping 1964 essay titled "What is a
Film?", Fuller gets no closer to technicalities than this: “What other
medium can take us into the eye of a character, probe through his mind, catch a
look that would take a dozen words to describe?” (10) As a result, there has
been little appreciation, so far, of Fuller’s true craft as a director. (11)
Pickup
on South Street would be a good place to start such a
project of recovery, since it is his most classical film, demonstrating what Victor Perkins has described as a “strategy of style”, a “rhetoric more or less
constantly in play which is nevertheless not a particularly obtrusive rhetoric”
(12) – a far cry from the typical kino-fist reveries. In both Pickup on South Street and The Big Red One, we see Fuller’s mastery
in deploying dialogue-less, action-based scenes to advance narration and
express complex arrangements of milieu and theme – as in the wonderfully
economic colliding of bodies, looks, gestures, characters and narrative lines
in the former (culminating in the immortal opening exchange: “What
happened?”/”I’m not sure yet”), and the heartbreaking scene of Lee Marvin
carrying a dying child on his shoulders in the latter, an extended passage
structured delicately around mechanical, anempathic toy music. In Fuller’s more modernist mood, Shock
Corridor and The Naked Kiss (truly
twin peaks of ‘60s cinema!) generate their complex effects of disquiet from
what he described as “a European tempo, that to me is a superior tempo. If you
make any scenes with violence the contrast is excellent”. (13)
Fuller directed five films of varying lengths after White Dog, as well as writing novels,
his wonderful autobiography, a travel book on old Manhattan, even a comic book
– but in the fifteen-year period until his death, he mainly moved in the
larger-than-life realm of his own myth. As Coursodon & Tavernier point out,
he was one of the few filmmakers ever to benefit consistently from the support
of genuinely cinephile producers (Peter Bogdanovich, Jon Davison, Jacques
Bral). (14) Street of No Return (1989) is typical of the work of this period – some wild and outrageous scenes,
mostly referring back to his past glories, but swamped by some
less-than-wonderful attempts at emulating rock-video mannerisms. The Day of Reckoning (1990), adapted for
TV from a Patricia Highsmith story, is a grimmer and more perverse adieu.
In the meantime, he acted for Amos Gitai (Golem, the Ghost of Exile, 1992), Aki Kaurismäki (La Vie de bohème, 1992) and brother Mika (Tigrero:
A Film That was Never Made, 1994), Wim Wenders (The State of Things [1982], plus a spookily touching envoi in The End of Violence [1997]) and Larry Cohen (A
Return to Salem’s Lot, 1987) – Cohen being a close artistic cousin of
Fuller, an equally uneven melodramatist of special distinction, whose great
ideas occasionally outrun his capacity to depict them entirely legibly on
screen.
For me, the best testament to Fuller from this final period is
John McNaughton’s telemovie Girls in Prison (1994), from a script
by Fuller and his wife Christa; this bracingly straight politicisation of a
pulp standard from the ‘50s hurls in everything – blacklist, war, media
corruption – and binds it to the collective rage of women who find solidarity
behind bars. It’s Shock Corridor with
a happy ending. And definitely not primitive.
NOTES 1.
Jean-Pierre Coursodon and Bertrand Tavernier, 50 ans de cinéma américain (Paris:
Nathan, 1995), pp. 501-502.
2.
Ronnie Scheib, "Tough Nuts to Crack: Fuller’s Shock Corridor", Framework, no. 19 (1982), p. 29.
3.
Manny Farber, Negative
Space (New York: Da Capo, 1998), p. 56. Farber’s more extensive 1969 essay
on the director appears on pp. 129-133. These texts were subsequently reprinted
in Farber on Film: The Complete Film
Writings of Manny Farber (Library of America, 2016).
4.
Luc Moullet, “Sam Fuller: In Marlowe’s Footsteps”, in Jim
Hiller (ed.), Cahiers du Cinéma – The
1950s: Neo-Realism, Hollywood, New Wave (London: Routledge & Kegan
Paul, 1985), p. 148. Moullet has reprinted and commented on this early essay
(written when he was 22) in his splendid collection, Piges choisies (Capricci: 2009).
5.
Ibid, p. 153.
6.
David Will & Peter Wollen (eds), Samuel Fuller (Edinburgh Film Festival, 1969); Phil Hardy, Samuel Fuller (London: Studio Vista,
1970); Nicholas Garnham, Fuller (London: Secker and Warburg, 1971). For more on these books and their cultural
moment, see my review of Marsha Gordon, Film is Like a Battleground: Sam Fuller’s War Movies (2017).
7.
Don Ranvaud, “An Interview with Sam Fuller”, Framework, no. 19 (1982), p. 28. back
8.
Scheib, “Tough Nuts to Crack”, p. 36. back
9.
Ranvaud, “An Interview”, p. 28.
10.
Samuel Fuller, “What is a Film?”, Cinema, Vol. 2 No. 2 (July 1964), p. 22.
11. The late 2010s saw a new wave of retrospectives igniting magazine dossiers and books on Fuller, not all of which I have yet consulted: see, for instance, Jean Narboni, Samuel Fuller, un homme à fables (Capricci, 2017); Frank Lafond, Samuel Fuller, jusqu’à l’épuisement (Rouge Profond, 2017); Jacques Deniel & Jean-François Rauger (eds), Samuel Fuller: Le choc et la caresse (Yellow Now, 2018); and Trafic, no. 104 (December 2017). Mention must also be made of Fuller’s splendid autobiography, A Third Face: My Tale of Writing, Fighting and Filmmaking (2004), and the unconventional film subsequently adapted it from it by his daughter, Samantha Fuller: A Fuller Life (2013). back
12.
V.F. Perkins et al, "The Return of Movie", Movie, no.
20 (Spring 1975), p. 6.
13.
Ranvaud, "An Interview", p. 27. back
14.
Coursodon & Tavernier, 50
ans de cinéma américain, p. 503. back
© Adrian Martin November 1997 / July 2002 / updates December 2021 |
