Samuel Fuller

Writer-producer-director Samuel Fuller, who died last October at the age of 86, has been something of a paradoxical cinematic figure for the last 30 years. While revered by film professionals, and a profound influence on contemporary filmmakers from Martin Scorsese to Wim Wenders, years of forced inactivity have cost him his audience. Nobody out there knows who he is any more.

Starting tonight, Cinematheque Ontario will take a crack at redressing that situation, presenting a complete retrospective of Fuller’s writer-director work, Pulp Fictions: The Films of Samuel Fuller. Twenty-two features will be screened, virtually any one of which will feel like a good bottle of bourbon smashed over your head.

Fuller was undoubtedly American cinema’s greatest master of what might be called the two-fisted school of writing and directing. His movies have Army-tough titles like Fixed Bayonets and Pickup on South Street, and are populated by hard-boiled criminals and hard-bitten dames, soldiers and prostitutes, cocky journalists and crazies. Stories appear to have been ripped straight from the pages of yesterday’s dime-store novels; dialogue is notable mostly for it’s utility and economy of means. (A sample from Underworld USA: “It was a pretty tough break you had, being born in prison and your mother dying there.”)

But let us not confuse two-fisted with ham-handed: if this is moviemaking reduced to its most basic terms, Fuller gives it the virtues a good pulp novelist would. A Fuller project starts with a bang, moves along at a good clip, has a sound emotional structure, snappy dialogue and ferocious attitude. All of the above are brought to the screen with a visual chutzpah that recalls Orson Welles on PCP. All in all, it takes you places you cinematically never dreamed existed—what Quentin Tarantino and Jean-Luc Goddard played at, Samuel Fuller actually was.

This is not to say that after a steady viewer diet of recent Hollywood filmmaking, his cinematic universe doesn’t take some getting used to. For example, 1957’s China Gate might seem to the Fuller neophyte to have been made by a crazy person. A hard-boiled romance-adventure set in 1954 Vietnam, China Gate begins with the disconcerting words: “this movie is dedicated to France.” Shot with such visual economy that the studio had to insert fake closeups into the location footage with an optical printer, China Gate features Angie Dickenson as an alcoholic half-Chinese prostitute leading a multi-lateral group of commandos to destroy a cache of weapons somewhere in North Vietnam—weapons guarded by a Vietnamese chieftain portrayed by Lee Van Cleef.

Fuller claimed cinema was “like a battlefield.... Love, hate, action, violence, death. In one word: emotion!” A collateral benefit is that his battlefields sometimes feel like domestic melodrama. (Imagine John Wayne casting Maureen O’Hara as his romantic lead in The Green Berets and you’ll have a ghost of an idea what China Gate feels like.) And as in a battlefield, narrative feels confused, elliptical, sometimes nonexistent. A Fuller story jumps all over the place and often the only continuity left to a viewer is an emotional one. Two questions constantly force themselves upon you as you watch: First, what on earth is going on here? Second, why am I enjoying it so much? After a while, you stop asking the first question.

It’s a wise course of action to take if you plan to watch a lot of the man’s work. A lot of potentially unsettling things await the unwary, like the almost absurd cold-war cant of many of his 50’s movies, or the alarming tendency of a lot of his films to briefly turn into musicals for no particular reason. (Sometimes both happen at once—In China Gate, Nat King Cole, not long after crooning the title song, says he’s fighting in Indochina because there are “still a lot of live commies around.”) Romance doesn’t develop between characters so much as it simply occurs, without explanation, excuse, or credibility.

Reading the reviews of 30 and 40 years ago you get a sense that critics more happy in the company of directors like Elia Kazan and Stanley Kramer found this kind of thing all very embarrassing. Seen today though, it arouses awe more than anything else (you move beyond wincing about five minutes into your first film); it seems wonderful that in an age of such false sophistication as the 50’s that anybody would be so brazen—Holden Caufield would have gone nuts over this stuff.

He would have been particularly fond of 1963’s Shock Corridor, Fuller’s history of postwar America from the point of view of an outsider pushed to the screaming point. Here an egomaniacal reporter gets himself committed to an insane asylum in order to solve a murder; once there he slowly goes crazy himself. The extremely high-temperature melodrama sometimes camouflages Shock Corridor’s seriousness of purpose: Fuller makes it clear that what has made the inmates insane in the first place is post-war America. Shock Corridor skates along the edge of hysteria for most of it’s running time, and once falls gloriously off the edge into what must be the single most surreal episode of anti-racist filmmaking ever to appear in an American movie.

1964’s The Naked Kiss is virtually all over the edge, as if Blue Velvet had arrived on the scene 20 years early. Something amazing happens in it just about every 90 seconds: Absurd bursts of fantasy, handicapped children breaking into song; from one moment to the next you have no idea where the director is going—it’s as if the screen has been hard-wired directly to his id. Naked Kiss is Fuller’s most gloriously out-of-control exercise, and it pretty well killed his career.

One can’t help but see parallels between Fuller and another director whose Hollywood career ended at about the same time, fellow melodramatist Douglas Sirk (although Fuller is Sirk only by way of the Army stockade). Both had trouble finding critical support because of the perceived cheeziness and lowbrow appeal of their work. Yet to dismiss Fuller’s cinema as mere pulp fiction is like dismissing Douglas Sirk’s melodramas as big-screen soaps: superficially accurate but profoundly untrue.

Fuller and Sirk actually share many of the same virtues: the—sometimes shocking—emotional immediacy of their direction (and if you think it’s easy, have a look at what happens when Steven Spielberg tries it); the beauty of their images; the propulsiveness of their storytelling and the simple, almost insane watchability of everything that they put up on the screen. Their movies are designed to overpower audiences: Sirk with a tug at the heart, Fuller with a sock in the kisser.

You go with the tools you’ve got, I guess. Fuller is revered by film people for his great cinematic eye but even more for his authenticity; his courage to utterly and uncompromisingly be his crazed self when he makes a film. As an employable filmmaker this probably cost him the last thirty years of his working life. But they are also the qualities which makes virtually everything he has ever shot compulsively viewable for those of us on the other side of the movie screen: He gives us everything there is up front and holds nothing back. We love Samuel Fuller because he wears his guts on his sleeve.

-Published in the Globe and Mail, 1998