Samuel Fuller — Studio C

Samuel Fuller Retrospective (in two parts), The Daily Cardinal, spring 1999

Madison can consider itself fortunate. The Samuel Fuller retrospective film series currently showing at the UW Cinemateque is a compelling argument why. Where filmgoers in Chicago were treated in recent years to impressive and enjoyably thorough retrospectives of Fellini and Bergman, Madison’s filmgoers can enjoy the brash enticements of a semester-long series devoted to Fuller.

Something more on the level of a series devoted to the films of another widely influential but popularly neglected film director like Robert Bresson (whose Pickpocket was an unexpected cinematic treat made available recently to vigilant filmgoing locals), the current series of Fuller films is giving currency to the late insurgent writer-director, while offering an exhilarating answer to the question: Who is Samuel Fuller?

It may seem contradictory to place Fuller, a rigorously American American director in a context with an Italian, a Swedish and a French director. But, as was the case for so many American jazz musicians, Fuller’s reception abroad was, for the most part, one of reverence and gratitude; consequently, he has acquired a cultish adoration traditionally reserved in this country for foreign directors.

Stung by the relative oblivion to which his films were regularly consigned and, more pragmatically, by the collapse of the Hollywood studio system that had tenuously sustained him, Fuller relocated to Paris in the ‘60s. Already an icon among French New Wave directors, Fuller’s work — through its palpable influence in film and its emergence in film publications as a topic for thoughtful consideration — acquired a devout following. His most visible champion, the French director Jean-Luc Godard, cast him in a cameo in the 1965 film Pierrot Le Fou, and it is there, slickly dressed, like a character in Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs, that Fuller offers his gruff, typically laconic doctrine for making movies: “The film is like a battleground. There’s love, hate, action, violence, death. In one word, emotions.” (Fuller, incidentally, once told The New York Times Magazine that death was “the most important emotion”).

Godard isn’t Fuller’s only acolyte, of course. Martin Scorsese, who devoted segments of his 1995 British Film Institute documentary series to two of Fuller’s films (Pickup on South Street and Shock Corridor), forcefully, and rather rhapsodically, defines Fuller’s distinctive ingenuity in the documentary The Typewriter, the Rifle and the Movie Camera(shown on campus last weekend). He even confesses to having lifted a scene from Fuller’s The Steel Helmet (also shown last weekend) for his own Raging Bull.

Quentin Tarantino and Tim Robbins in the same documentary are at times reduced to unrestrained displays of adulation for the then-living director whose influence is apparent in their work as directors. Jim Jarmusch, who worked previously with Fuller (Tigrero: A Film That Was Never Made), is more reserved but no less sweeping in his praise for the director.

It’s probably not coincidental that Fuller would be identified with a group of directors who typically evince such idiosyncratic vigor that they are often regarded as independent filmmakers, whether that designation is accurate or not. As Tarantino contends in the documentary, Fuller, despite appearances to the contrary, was not an independent filmmaker.

When he began directing films in Hollywood (as well as writing and often producing them), the motion picture industry was at a crossroads. In 1949, the year Fuller made his first picture, I Shot Jesse James, television was beginning to permeate American popular entertainment, thereby threatening its two mass entertainment predecessors (radio and motion pictures) for supremacy — not to mention their audience. Hollywood’s forces regrouped (television was then centered in New York City), but hardly retrenched. Big, colorful motion picture spectacles came into vogue, towering over the small-screen black-and-white product of their upstart contender, and ringing up budgets close to $50 million.

But there was Sam Fuller, turning out pictures in 15, sometimes 10 days at a fraction of the cost (his third picture, The Steel Helmet, was shot in 12 days and cost $104,000). Fuller was compelled by small budgets to be resourceful, often cutting corners in surprising ways (in Shock Corridor he used midgets on the film’s only set to create an illusion of receding space). Such measures were certainly not unique to Fuller’s low-budget pictures. But it is the subject matter and what he does with it, both as screenwriter and director, that severs any substantive connection his films have with many other B-genre films of the era.

This weekend’s film, Pickup on South Street, considered by some to be Fuller’s best film, gives vivid meaning to Scorsese’s references to Fuller’s efficient, tabloid style. The film’s 80 minutes are packed tight with quick character studies, rapid plot twists, explosive outbursts, ethical ambiguity and a forceful directorial immediacy.

As the Samuel Fuller film series at the UW Cinemateque continues during the next two weekends, fans of American film and its pervasive legacy should take note. Fuller’s own legacy, expressed largely through fanciful technical artistry, has inspired the devotion of directors like Jean-Luc Godard and Martin Scorsese.

The two films — this weekend’s Park Row (1952) and next weekend’s Forty Guns (1957) — are archetypal Fuller films that deploy meager resources, hasty shooting schedules, ponderous narrative schemes and Fuller’s total creative control as writer-producer-director.

Park Row, Fuller’s fifth film, was perhaps the director’s most personal film. A former copy boy and crime reporter, Fuller clung to dewy-eyed journalistic ideals his entire life. Park Row looks at late-19th century New York journalism and the origins of its many 20th century incarnations (circulation wars for instance). Fuller apparently was offered complete studio backing for the film, but the studio wanted a musical with Gregory Peck and Rita Hayworth as co-stars. He pulled out, raised $200,000 and made the film he wanted.

Forty Guns was Fuller’s 11th film and is something else entirely. Much like Nicholas Ray had already done with Johnny Guitar (1953), Fuller imposes his own aesthetic objectives on an unlikely genre — the Western. The two films also share a common feminist thread with Barbara Stanwyck in the Joan Crawford role as a whip-cracking land baroness.

Fuller considered scenes in these films to be his two favorites. The first, in Park Row, is an intricate tracking shot that follows action continuously onto three different sets. The second, in Forty Guns, is another long take featuring an improbable lateral crane-and-track shot through a western town. Forty Guns is also noted for its use of dissolve and close-up.

Perhaps the best reason to see these two offbeat films is that neither is available on video.