A Sam Fuller Retrospective, Part One

"No punches pulled! Nothing held back!"

Samuel Fuller’s films are effortlessly hardboiled. A journalist, pulp writer, and soldier (the only person to both fight at D-Day and recreate it on film), Fuller’s films are an idiosyncratic street talk, poetry, jargon he picked up overseas, and the odd port-Sorkin rant about the power of good journalism. Nothing comes easy for his characters, yet they go about getting shit done—revenge or running a newspaper or fighting a rearguard action.

The first time I saw Pickup on South Street and Shock Corridor, I confess I didn’t get them. I instantly came around to his westerns, though, Forty Guns (with Barbara Stanwyck) and Run of the Arrow (with Rod Steiger).

But it was Fuller’s war films that grabbed me. I don’t love war movies as a genre, but The Big Red One and Fixed Bayonets! are unsparing, brutal, not stupid at all, and not touching or morally improving in any way. They feel like no other war films.

I’ve been watching and rewatching Fuller’s films for the past few months. I haven’t seen a bad one yet. In many ways Fuller reminds me of Dashiell Hammett—a love of right action and an inability to ascribe positive motives to anyone are common features in the work of both. The films are a lot of fun.

The A Films

Pickup on South Street

What Ralph Meeker does for PIs in Kiss Me Deadly, Richard Widmark does for pickpockets in Pickup—a brutal and half-smart guy way over his head but fighting valiantly. Widmark picks the pocket of a communist agent, ending up with a chemical formula on microfilm that could be a payday or make him a target. Thelma Ritter plays a heartwarmingly entrepreneurial stool pigeon saving up for her own funeral—both a nice metaphorical touch, and probably somebody Fuller once met. Pickup is bleak, spare, and terrific.

I Shot Jesse James

About half as long as The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, but as poetic in its stripped down way. John Ireland (great in All the King’s Men, Red River, and as Lieutenant Nulty in Farewell My Lovely) plays Ford as a lovestruck kid who sees killing his friend as his ticket to redemption and the heart of Barbara Britton. From the jump things don’t turn out for him. “The Ballad of Jesse James,” used for a comic Nick Cave cameo in Assassination, continually haunts Ford in Fuller’s version.

The Naked Kiss

Someone called Daniel Clowes’s cover “the ugliest Criterion edition of all time.” It’s a misleading cover, I think. The film is about a sex worker (Constance Towers) attempting to go straight. The people she meets—cops, coworkers, her friends, her fiancée—turn out to be far more morally suspect than she is. Brilliant and hardboiled without being strictly a crime story.

Underworld USA

Cliff Robertson plays a juvenile offender whose no-account father is murdered by three caporegimes of the city’s crime syndicate. Robertson insinuates himself into the syndicate, paying them back one by one, as viciously as he can. Fuller uses the revenge plot as a frame to hang an exposé of how organized crime works. Great fun.

The Big Red One

The reconstructed version is arguably Samuel Fuller’s best and richest film. A group of young soldiers led by a sergeant (Lee Marvin) survive combat over two continents, including D-Day and the liberation of the camps. One of the characters is clearly a stand-in for Fuller himself, while Marvin gets one of his best roles.

The ‘B’ Films (also pretty great)

Fixed Bayonets!

"Somebody's got to get left behind to get their bayonets wet” is one of the most casually brutal lines of dialog. A platoon is assigned to fight a rearguard action during the Korean War, allowing the bulk of their force to retreat in safety. Knowing they’ll likely all die, issues of command and responsibility play out along with incredibly tense battle scenes. Like The Big Red One on a much smaller scale, but with a nice Richard Basehart performance as a soldier in line to command, worried he won’t live up to the job.

House of Bamboo

A man (Robert Stack) arrives in postwar Japan, presents himself to the wife of a dead friend (Shirley Yamaguchi), and attempts to learn how the man died by infiltrating a gang of armed robbers who work out of Pachinko parlors. The gang, led by Robert Ryan, kill their own members if they get wounded during a heist. Nobody is what they seem to be. The Vista-vision shots of Japanese society are pleasant, but they bloat what should have been a stripped down noir. But Ryan is great as the villain, and the shootout on a rooftop amusement ride is cleverly done.

Park Row

The love for the history of the printing press, civic journalism, and human storytelling is overwhelming in this story of the battle between a scrappy news editor and his rich rival. Aside from a few Ayn Randian speeches to the (female) Publisher Who Just Doesn’t Get it, there’s a workplace reality to the film, a tactility, that animates it. Every part of the news gathering operation gets its moment, even the innovation of hawking papers on the street. Great fun.

It Happened In Hollywood

An hour-long oddity included on the Sam Fuller DVD box set, though he didn’t direct it and is one of three credited screenwriters. A silent film cowboy star can’t adjust to the talkies, though his costar (played by Fay Wray) can. With Gary Cooper in the lead it could have been stellar, though Richard Dix is admirable. I have no idea who wrote what, but I could see Fuller writing the scene where a director tries to warm Dix up to playing a bad guy in a gangster film: “You shot plenty of rustlers, what’s the difference with shooting a cop?” The ending is smart.

This wraps up part one of a survey, which might eventually encompass his daughter’s documentary A Fuller Life, his novel Brainquake re-released by Hard Case Crime, or his memoir A Third Face.