"The Story Broke His Neck" (24 Hours of Samuel Fuller, Part 1)

Sam Fuller had the sort of respect for culture, knowledge, and human potential that people used to call "American" before we became cynical about achievement and proud of ignorance.

Born in 1912 to Eastern European immigrants - his factory-worker father had already changed the family name from Rabinowitz - he stood tall by playing close to the ground.  After his family moved to New York, he played truant to help support his widowed mother and six siblings, later got kicked out of high school while working as the nation's youngest crime reporter.  He left a successful staff job on a daily paper to wander the country through the Depression and filed stories from Al Capone's favorite pool hall, Arkansas Klan rallies, the San Francisco Strike Riots.  Following fellow journalists to Hollywood, he halted a burgeoning screenwriting career to enlist after Pearl Harbor.  There he repeatedly refused a cushier job in the official press corps to do time as a dogface in the First U.S. Infantry Division, "The Big Red One;" he survived North Africa, Sicily, Omaha Beach.  He returned home a published novelist, resumed his screenwriting career, grabbed the opportunity to direct.

It was a sensational life that had no room for glamour.  Fuller never got the ink from under his fingernails or the blood out of his eyes.  Consistency forced his contradictions to work themselves out:  A tough little guy who loved big cigars, he was an idealist who craved realism, a peace-lover whose work exploded into brutish bursts of violence.  He held a steadfast, progressive moral position, but was drawn to fringe elements like crime and insanity.  He could be generous and loyal and humble, he insisted that he got his way.

The sheer force of his insistence has made him a patron saint of American independent filmmakers.  "If you don't like the films of Sam Fuller," Martin Scorsese says in the foreword to Fuller's autobiography A Third Face, "then you just don't like cinema."

I started that book a short while ago, I'm writing this from page 307 (of 562).  It's a great read, Fuller's an enthusiastic writer with a yearning for good stories (or, as he prefers, a "hard-on" for "yarns").  But I don't want him to spoil his own pictures for me.  When he died in 1997 he left behind 23 features.  About two-thirds of those are available on DVD.  I'm using this as an opportunity to visit most of his filmography for the first time.

Like the last time I did this, I'm liable to give away details while discussing the film (SPOILER ALERT:  In I Shot Jesse James, Jesse James gets shot) and it's unlikely I'll be insightful or profound in anyway was.  Sort of a lose-lose for you.

Also, I'm not sure I'll actually like a lot of these.  Fuller's cinematic concerns don't necessarily match up with my own under the best of circumstances, and I know the circumstances weren't always favorable.  I'm dreading the one with Burt Reynolds and the shark.  But I'm willing to try.

Let's go!

I Shot Jesse James (1949, 81 minutes)(buy/rent)

"Y'got your back to me, Kelly!  Turn around!"

Fuller's first film - the story of James' cohort/assassin Robert Ford - is a promising start with a promising start.  (Well, after the amateurish credit sequence - the budget had run out.)  In a series of posed images and tense close-ups, the director artfully captures the "Nobody move!" atmosphere of a bank heist.  Ford (John Ireland) is the only one in motion; he's tucked away in back stuffing cash in a sack.  James (a Lincoln-looking Reed Hadley) is front and center, a position of authority that nonetheless slips away; the teller under his watch triggers the alarm with his foot, the scene explodes into action and gunsmoke.

Flick's dressed like a Western, but Fuller wanted to make a psychological drama.  It's not entirely successful as either.  Ireland's dumb, blank face doesn't hint at what (if any) gears are grinding back there.  Unlike Andrew Dominik's recent, elegiac The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, where we've the luxury of wallowing in the relationship between the two men, Shot is so blunt that we don't even get to know James before he's out of the picture.  He comes off as a pretty amiable guy.  Dominik methodically reiterates variations on Ford's inferiority; Fuller has him blurt out a desire for anonymity, to go straight.  There's a lot of idealized talk about "getting hitched" (Fuller gives Ford an ambivalent actress-singer girlfriend) and farming.  When Ford starts earning a living re-enacting the murder on stage - an awesome historical tidbit that allows the directors to pluralize their frames - Dominik's Ford is earnestly-but-cluelessly seeking the notoriety his hero James enjoyed.  Fuller's Ford just wants a job.

There's an inherent problem centering a film around Ford in that he's never going to be sympathetic.  The man he shot was, in Fuller's words, "a lowdown thief, a pervert, and a sonofabitch."  But Ford shot that lowdown thief in the back, in the pervert's own living room, while the sonofabitch was straightening a fucking picture frame.

The plotting is aimless and awkward and pocked with unlikelihoods, and the central character's pathetic, but there are some boffo scenes and a good underlying idea intermittently observed.

Fuller posited his story as "a yarn about a guy who kills the man he loves."  He claims James was a bisexual (and weirdly follows that assertion with the statement that James dressed as a woman during train robberies), has Ford confess his love long after he does the deed.  In these post-Woo times every buddy movie (maybe not the ones starring Mel Gibson - does he have any buddies left?) operates under the assumption of homoeroticism; it was a ballsy choice to make in this country in that genre in 1949.  There's a suggestive bathing scene - I can't remember if Dominik reprises this in Assassination - Fuller slips in under the guise of foreshadowing.  James is sitting naked in an outdoor tub, gifts Ford with a new handgun.  Ford freezes at the sight of James' bare back, and his pard'ner tells him: "Well, go ahead, Bob.  What're you waitin' for?  There's my back...  Scrub it."

(Fuller's moneyman - independent producer/theater chain owner Robert L. Lippert had been a fan of Fuller's first novel, financed these first three pictures - never picked up on any of the sex stuff.  He just wanted a movie with cowboys and horsies.)

We're not given enough information to infer that the assassination is an act of sexual guilt or frustration, though the direction of the attack is out there for anyone looking to read things in.  (I don't think the director meant to equate homosexuality with cowardice.)  Fuller's interested in the loss and guilt that results from the shooting.  That stage re-enactment is an obvious sort of existential hell - shoot your lover/friend in the back, every night! - and Fuller economically uses a single performance to rob Ford of his emotional numbness.  The man staggers offstage in the middle of the show, without having pulled the trigger.  We find him in a saloon.

(Here's the same scene from Assassination, with that film's composer Nick Cave doing a cameo as the troubadour.)

In quick succession Ford feels the weight of his action, learns the nature of his reputation, discovers the shooting has put his life in danger.  Fuller hangs on faces a lot in the picture.  It's an appropriate reaction to Ford's legendary cowardice, of course, but it's also something that fits the square-shooting director:  You look a man in the eye.  (In his book, Fuller proudly quotes then-critic Jean-Luc Godard's reaction to the close-ups as having "an oppressive intensity the cinema has not experienced since Dreyer's Joan of Arc.")

There's a real power in the film's final sequence, and those're the first shots Fuller ever directed.  Instead of yelling action, he fired one of the prop department's Colt 45s into the air; instead of yelling "Cut," he said, "Forget it."  It's a low-budget flick, filmed quickly - you can tell they were losing light on that first day, it doesn't cut together well - but there's some beautiful photography by Ernest Miller.

(Criterion isn't lying when they say their Eclipse line is bare-bones.  The film looks great, but there's no trailer, no nothin'.)

The Baron of Arizona (1950, 97 minutes)(buy/rent)

"...but with you, I'm afraid."

Fuller takes an obscure historical swindle and sweetens it up:  Late 19th-century con artist James Addison Reavis spent years forging documents and diaries and petitioned the U.S. government - which by treaty had agreed to recognize Spanish land deeds in the newly nationalized Southwest - to acknowledge his title to an area encompassing almost the entirety of the territory of Arizona.

The protagonist's dedication to a sprawling scheme of international scope - during more than a decade of plotting, Fuller's Reavis joins a monastery, romances gypsies, etc. - coupled with leading man Vincent Price's (!) creepy charm should provide a singular character.  But as with Ford, Fuller fails to crack this nut.  The man is, as the director says in his book, "an arrogant sonofabitch."  But we never figure out what makes Reavis run.  There are certainly less elaborate ways to accrue wealth.  The film hints at a need for official respect, and there's a sort of told-you-so revenge aspect (it's briefly mentioned that Reavis was once a land office clerk who thought the treaty ridiculous).

The film decides that Reavis was really looking for love because it has nowhere else to go.

Despite a painful opening that's something like five solid minutes of chatty exposition, Fuller does an impressive job of making a document-based crime interesting.  The period setting marries nicely with both Price's hammy meloself and the director's romantic tendencies.  A grubby orphan is suddenly quoting Aristotle!  This is an actual line of dialogue: "Oh, Rita, you're like a rich curtain before a doorway of wild, wonderful miracles."  As long as we know it's all a con, it works.

Tall tale crashes once Reavis assumes his barony.   The cat-and-mouse aspect the director hoped for never catches fire because the cat (a forgery expert) mostly unravels the yarn offscreen.  Baron contorts itself through stages as a populist Western, a courtroom drama, a love story, nothing takes.

The Steel Helmet (1951, 84 minutes)(buy/rent)

"He's a South Korean when he's running with you.  He's a North Korean when he's running after you."

Tough little flick that made a lot of noise.

Grizzled WWII "retread" Sgt. Zack - he's re-enlisted for the Korean conflict - is taken prisoner and survives a shot to the head when his captors decide to execute their POWs.  Left for dead, he joins a lost squad of GIs who've been ordered to set up an observation point behind enemy lines in a Buddhist temple.

The director decided to inject the war film genre with his earned perspective.  "For moviegoers to get the idea of real combat, you'd have to shoot at them every so often from either side of the screen.  The casualties in the theater would be bad for business," Fuller says in his book.  "What I try to do is make audiences feel the emotional strife of war."

Gone is any sense of glory or scale.  From the amazing, wordless opening sequence, things are kept tight and low to the ground.  Confusion and inane downtime chatter are the norm, honor and country are never mentioned.  Corpses are stripped for goods, friendlies are fired upon.

Which isn't to say it's cold.  There are obvious attempts at sentimentality, starting with the South Korean orphan who tags along.  He writes prayers to Buddha, he sings his national anthem along to "Auld Lang Syne."  (The way it's written, one of the kid's first actions is to object to a racial slur; the actor's too sunny to make the scene tough, though.)   Zack nicknames the kid "Short Round," and yes, the character in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom was an indirect reference.  There is some clumsy, ongoing comic relief about baldness (as well as some good, wry stuff, like using a giant Buddha's hand to support an IV bag).  America's civil rights struggles and U.S. Japanese-American internment camps get forceful mentions from the mouths of the enemy.  (The squad is pointedly interracial.)

(The scale is also out of necessity.  It's the first of these pictures where the low budget is an obvious hindrance.  Shot in ten days, there's some reliance on stock footage for battle stuff, some questionable exteriors.  Fuller's insistence on using location sound makes everything clankety-clankety-clankety.)

What's most effective - really, it's stunning - is how Fuller uses his main character.  The director fought to use unknown Gene Evans in the lead.  Evans had served for three-and-a-half years in WWII with the Army as an engineer; he was nearsighted and is lousy at making eye contact with other actors and that's perfect.  Because his been-there know-it-all sergeant who dresses the script thick with lingo from its steel pot down to its clodhoppers?  He's shell-shocked and just as lost as everyone else.  He's no hero, he's no better than North Korean unit that turned on him before the film starts.  The only thing he knows is how to survive.  Respect and pity him for that.

I have no way to gauge how groundbreaking the approach might have been; I've little experience with pre-Vietnam war films, so I'm used to post-patriotism.  But Helmet - a film whose opening titles include a dedication to the United States Infantry - got called out about its loyalties all over the place.  Fuller was asked to testify at the Pentagon, where they told him his film looked like "communist indoctrination."  It got plenty of press from all this, it got its share of accolades, and it did plenty of business.

The movie grossed so much that the director's share of the profits was "a couple million bucks after taxes." 20th Century Fox' Darryl Zanuck swooped in and signed Fuller to a non-exclusive six-picture deal.  The director would spend half each year making Fox product, half each year doing anything he wanted.

Fixed Bayonets! (1951, 92 minutes)(buy/rent/stream on Hulu)

"It takes more than guts to stay alive in this business."

And the first thing Fox wanted him to do was duplicate the success of The Steel Helmet.  Bayonets is another Korean War flick, again features Gene Evans, is also dedicated to the U.S. Infantry (here called "The Queen of Battles").  It's billed as an adaptation of a book by John Brophy, but that was Zanuck's way of countering charges that the studio was just remaking Helmet.

Operating under a bigger budget - Bayonets had the same set designer as Gone With the Wind - and with twice the shooting time, Fuller still keeps things contained.  One platoon of 48 men is left behind on a snowy mountain so that their regiment of 15,000 can fall back across a river to safer ground.

So Fixed Bayonets! is about a retreat.

There's a long scene where our guys stand and watch as their fellow troops leave them behind.

The purpose is appreciation - using close-ups not just to establish characters, but acknowledge individuals - but it's tempting to see the long march out as the director dispatching his new studio resources and sticky with the scraps.  The scenery might be OSHA-certified but the film doesn't play everything safe.  US soldiers step on their own land mines, they fire on enemy medics, or they're unwilling to fire their weapons at all.  Fuller:  "I firmly believed that the only way to honor GIs at war was by showing the truth."

Richard Basehart plays a corporal who dreads pulling the trigger - a not uncommon situation (pdf), but one described in the film's trailer as "the strangest fear a soldier ever had" - and who dreads the way responsibility falls towards him like so many dead superiors.

This isn't the impressive success that Helmet is - its main character's challenge is up front and overcome - and it shares some of that film's weaknesses.  Most of the outfit is cursorily drawn up - there's "Whitey," "Jonesy," "Big Mouth."  The script works too hard at packing lines with lingo.  The comic relief is again tiresome; here it's obtuse banter between a Chico Marxish Italian-American and an overeducated WASP, ugh.

Judging by his book and this film - and I imagine it's a thousand percent accurate - the biggest thing soldiers worried about was their feet.  Trenchfoot, frostbite, etc.  Dry socks are an obsession.

"I told you:  I'm dead" might be the best last words I've heard.

This was James Dean's feature film debut, though I never noticed him (his only line might have been cut).  To prove to Zanuck that the ricochet scene was accurate, Fuller got the studio head to fire a Luger in a concrete screening room.  Fuller won a hundred-cigar bet, nobody got hurt.

The title, despite having an exclamation mark, has yet to be appropriated by an indie pop band.

Park Row (1952, 83 minutes)(*)

"Steal everything you can, but make it fresh."

Incensed that the newsrag he works for sacrifices truth for sensationalism, crusading editor Phineas "Mitch" Mitchell (Gene Evans again, he lost thirty pounds for the part) starts his own paper and leads a revolt that uses new ideas, new technology, and an unwavering sense of righteousness.

Sam Fuller loved the Fourth Estate.  And why wouldn't he?  He grew up there.

Barely a decade old Fuller became a streetcorner newsboy, selling several of the eleven daily New York City newspapers cranked out downtown on Park Row.  A tour of the process left him "smitten" with the press and its presses, and at twelve-and-a-half he lied about his age to become a copyboy at the New York Journal.  There he became a personal assistant to the editor-in-chief, Arthur Brisbane, sometimes running proofs to William Randolph Hearst's Riverside apartment.  His adolescence saw time in speakeasies rubbing elbows with big bylines like Damon Runyon-protégé Gene Fowler and celebrities like Jack Dempsey.  As a teenaged crime reporter for the New York Evening Graphic, his first scoop was the overdose of rising star Jeanne Eagels; he would witness at least a half dozen state executions.

From that intense upbringing came the love behind this film.  Fuller self-financed with $200,000 of his own money so he could tell it right.  (When pitched to Fox, Zanuck suggested it would make a nice musical.)  "I had to make it, if for no other reason than to pay homage to the memories of my youth on  that street."  Its opening tracking shot worships at the feet of statues of Gutenberg and Ben Franklin ("Printer, Patriot").  Fuller had already used newspapers as bit players; his first two films often flashed headlines as intertitled exposition.  Here they got top billing.  The opening graphic is a scrolling quilt of mastheads and the following bold block assertion:  "These are the names of the 1,772 daily newspapers in the United States.  One of them is the paper you read.  All of them are the stars of this story."

Park Row is not a flawless work, but it's undeniable, sloppy with enthusiasm and outrage.

The amped-up atmosphere - especially in a period fiction (it's set in the 1880's) about launching a newspaper (it's not about a news story, or even the procedure of reporting) - can seem ridiculous.  People shout things like, "You started a war!  A circulation war!"  With exclamation points!  There's some hot-headed hypocrisy.  One of Mitchell's early objections is "trial by newspaper," but he frankly manufactures news.  His first cause d'headline is a friend's publicity stunt, one Mitchell himself suggests.  He later manufactures a parade to mimic an editorial cartoon he's already printed.

"We fight with news, not knuckles!" he says in a scene right before another scene where he punches several people.  Red all over!

And black-and-white.  The film's dedication to Mitchell's determination throws things way one-sided.  It's not just the illiterate immigrant typesetter or the doe-eyed shoeshine boy-turned-printer's devil.  It's the vilification of the competition, who's so awful they're - get this - against the Statue of Liberty.  The most unfortunate aspect of this is that the Evil Empire is run by the only woman ("Charity Hackett") shown working in the business, and a wizened reporter uses her sex as an insult.  She inherited the once-great publishing house she oversees, we're told, and thank goodness her proud surname will die with her.

Sometimes actress Mary Welch seems to be made up to look like the Wicked Queen from Snow White.

Which makes it weird to watch as the film forces down a romance between Mitchell and Hackett.  Some of this is pathetic:  More than any of the man-on-press love, the coupling seems mechanized.  There is a woman in the movie so there must be a love story, right?  And of course she has to subjugate herself to Mitchell before she becomes an acceptable option.

But before she does, there's a great sort of grudge-fuck tension to their scenes together, something that smudges Mitchell's sainted soul with compromise.

(*)Park Row is not, unfortunately, on DVD.  But Turner Classic Movies aired it earlier this year, and it seemed a necessary part of Fuller's filmography, so I bent my rules.

Pickup on South Street (1953, 80 minutes)(buy/rent)

"You were always a regular kind of crook.  I never figured you for a louse."

When Thelma Ritter is in a movie, you know there will be at least one good thing about it.

This one gets great after she gets out.

A cannon hits the wrong mark, an errand girl finds herself embroiled in espionage, a stoolie craves a plot.  Great stuff.  Teeming with the tough talk, designed to disorient your sympathies, South Street seems so effortless that you're liable to not realize how simple it really is.

The set-up's as packed as a train at rush hour.  Hey, it's on a train at rush hour!

The woman in white - Candy (Jean Peters) - seems to have a pair of heavies after her.  Skip McCoy (Richard Widmark) slides up, fingers her goods, slips away.  The only dialogue in this scene comes at the end, one heavy asks the other, "What happened?" and gets the reply, "I'm not sure yet."  To have so many close ups on the subway, where no one is supposed to be looking at anyone else, is genius.  Widmark even glances in the lens a couple times.

My God man if you see something say something.

The two heavies keeping an eye on Candy are - we find out  - federal agents, following her to see where she delivers the sensitive material she's keeping in her wallet.  Did the exchange just happen?  Since Fuller subsequently saddles us with the cops and their story, it seems like we're in for a detective yarn, that the mission will be to right wrongs.  There is some blowhardy talk about "fighting Communism."

But Fuller is only interested in a group of people who have a practical ideology.  His petty crooks live in a world where everyone is only looking out for themselves.  "Is there a law now I gotta listen to lectures?" Widmark's pickpocket asks.  He's not going to help the authorities because the authorities have made him a three-time loser.  It takes a good part of the picture to accept that Widmark is the hero, and when he displays a loyalty to something other than himself it's a personal, practical, honest one.

The movie works its way back into Candy's purse, wraps around to the subway again for a bang-up climax.  This wasn't no two-bit noir, this was for Fox, the train and tracks were built across conjoined soundstages.  Fuller again shares a "Story by" credit with someone whose story he tossed aside.  And Zanuck backed up Fuller when J. Edgar Hoover, furious over scenes of cops doling out fink money and McCoy's pointed disrespect for authority, demanded changes.  According to an interview on the DVD, Fuller and Zanuck agreed to soften the line, "Don't wave the goddamn flag at me!"  They took the "goddamn" out.  "The last resort of a scoundrel," Fuller says, quoting Ben Franklin, "is patriotism."

South Street got Thelma Ritter an Oscar nomination.  It also won third place at the Venice Film Festival... where some European critics decried it as anti-communist propaganda.

When you piss both sides off, you are doing something right.

(CONTINUE TO PART TWO )

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