"A.O.E. Accumulation of Everything." (24 Hours of Samuel Fuller, Part 2)

(BACK TO PART ONE)

Hell and High Water (1954, 103 minutes)(buy/rent)

"I shall try my best to make you like me... as a scientist."

A private consortium suspects that nuclear activity is occurring in on an island in the neutral waters of the North Pacific.  They hire a mercenary WWII vet (Richard Widmark) to captain a submarine for a recon mission.  Packed in the tin can are a full crew of sweaty men and one va-va-voomish French scientist.

Fuller calls this "easily my least favorite picture" because it's not from one of his original scripts; he did this as a favor to Zanuck, who asked the director to cast his protégé/mistress Bella Darvi (the film's trailer calls her "the sensational new continental discovery").  Darvi's personal life seems more vivid than anything that wound up in this movie.

It's not that it's a mess; there's nothing to capture your interest.  Fuller peppers researched details and jargon about, but it never gets the lived-in feel of his Korean War movies.  A good chunk of the time is spent worrying about the presence of a broad on the sub (again, the trailer:  "A world no other woman had ever dared enter").  Darvi's given an embarrassing scene where she pleads to justify her existence.  Reactions range from, "That's no female, that's a scientist!" to "What makes a girl who looks like that get mixed up in science?"  There's a drunken attempt at rape.  No actual cavemen were harmed in the filming.

Inevitably, she's drawn to the captain.  Blame the tight quarters.  Widmark and Darvi come off like a cut-rate Steve McQueen and Leslie Caron.

The single best thing about the entire awful movie is the Asian-American seaman's ukulele reworking of "Don't Fence Me In."

Hell was one of Fox' first films in Cinemascope.  It made its money.  The colors can be nice.  The special effects - some laughable, now - got an Oscar nomination (and lost to another sub flick, Disney's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea).  According to Fuller, Spielberg called this one of his favorite films.

The credits run over some crisp military stock footage of an atomic blast.  "The government made us erase certain colors from the sequence ‘that could reveal nuclear secrets,'" Fuller wrote.  "We acquiesced, but I didn't understand what the hell they were talking about."

House of Bamboo (1955, 102 minutes)(buy/rent)

"Sayonara means ‘goodbye.'"

A group of former GIs mastermind a string of heists in post-war Japan.  Where does Robert Stack fit in?  Why doesn't his trenchcoat fit?

I have serious problems with this one, and before I go on I should note that it's apparently loved for its Cinemascope cinematography.  Alain Silver and James Ursini describe it in the DVD commentary as one of Fuller's better films.  (It's a very good commentary, actually, as they're informed noir fans with a respect but no reverence for the film.)

The challenge for me is to buy into a narrative work where plausibility isn't considered.

Fuller is interested in several things, here, and mostly took the project for the opportunity to shoot in Japan.  (Again, the story is credited to an unrelated source; the GI Heist plot was cannibalized from an independent project Fuller had tried to put together in London.)  The director was "fascinated with the Orient" and immersed himself in Japanese film while putting together the project.  Silver and Ursini cite Mizoguchi as an influence, Fuller's autobiography mentions several directors and singles out Kinugasa's The Gate of Hell.  Colors are postcard-vibrant, which affects the mood of what is a noirish story.  Cinemascope is lousy for close-ups, you find other ways to direct the eye; as the depth of field is kept deep, the widescreen image is often broken up into frames-within.

But he's not making a Japanese picture, he's making a culture clash picture, and he does this by showing the Americans as intruders and by making the American plot elements nonsensical.  There's a great moment in the gangster's den where traditional Japanese dancers toss off their kimonos and start swing dancing.  Stack is introduced as The Ugly American, repeatedly unlearning the language, boorishly stomping through the streets.  (Much of the film was shot on location, sometimes guerilla-style, and the streets fight back.  Without telling the actor, Fuller had a crewmember scream in Japanese that Stack was a thief; a mob attacked him.  Unfortunately, that take did not make it into the film.  Stack was not happy.)  The climax, a climactic gunfight between the lead Americans on a globe-like structure that towers over a rooftop amusement park, would feel like a commentary on our role as global bully... if its landmark use didn't make it feel like fourth-rate Hitchcock instead.

Just like the cinematography goes against the genre, Stack's noir wardrobe is made to look uncomfortable and uncool, the coat won't stretch across his midsection, he looks like he crawled out of the dump (and according to Silver and Ursini, Fuller found the coat in the garbage on the street).  The opening narration would be very noir if it didn't confusingly mix production information about the shooting of the film and plot information.  (I'm not sure whether the film is trying to be confusing or is confused.)

As he did in Hell and High Water, Fuller gives us stretches of foreign dialogue with no subtitles.

There are two romances in the movie, neither works.  First there's a male-female romance between Stack and someone we think is his late best friend's wife (Shirley Yamaguchi, a Chinese-born Japanese actress and New York socialite).  In his book Fuller's proud that he "insisted on casting a native for my lead" (in his next two films, he would cast a Spanish actress as a Sioux woman and Angie Dickinson as a woman who's part Chinese living in Vietnam).  And he rewarded her with lines like, "In Japan, a woman is taught from childhood how to pleasure a man."  But unlike other interracial film romances of that time, Fuller says, Yamaguchi and Stack got to kiss and Bamboo didn't dictate them a tragic ending.  The man spends more time showing skin than the woman does.  He doesn't have to explain his attraction to his "kimono girl," but she has to be ashamed she's taken up with a non-Japanese man.

The other romance, an unrequited one between gang boss Sandy Dawson (Robert Ryan) and Stack, is underplayed - Fuller didn't tell Stack about that, either.  Sandy's unexplained affection for the Stack character is supposed to be lust-based; that affection turns out to be a betrayal to his code of honor, the fatal flaw that brings him down.  And Fuller called this a film about betrayal.  If this were a straight noir film, the commentators rightly point out, Stack, not Yamaguchi, is the femme fatale.

But homosexuality was still dlsville back then, and the meager hints Fuller and Ryan give (mostly there's the boss' unisexual name and one scene where he cradles a dead henchman in a bathtub) aren't enough to cement the gaping inconsistencies in the plot.  There's a particularly bizarre pearl shop scene that makes the film look lazy and Sandy look like an idiot.  And that's the problem I'm having, here.  In the Fuller episode of Richard Schickel's documentary series The Men Who Made the Movies, the director states bluntly that he's only concerned with "the heat of the story."  In a lot of ways, this is a "hot" film.  Fuller prioritizes set pieces and visual ideas that betray narrative logic as much as any f/x-oriented roller coaster ride.  Why I can love this nonsense when Seijun Suzuki does it to this same sort of stuff but just groan through House of Bamboo, I don't know.  For all the ideas floating around in the film, its plot seems silly and dull, the characters seem dumb and unsympathetic.

Fuller's next project - Tigrero, which was to star John Wayne, Ava Gardner, and Tyrone Power, and was to be shot on location in Brazil's Mato Grosso - got ixnayed by insurance concerns.  It was revisited in a documentary and we'll get to that at the end of this project.

His next two finished films, Run of the Arrow and China Gate, aren't on DVD.  (These stills come from Gate's trailer.)  Arrow was for RKO, was Rod Steiger's first starring role - at Fuller's insistence, though the director regretted that when the shoot turned into a battle of wills.  It's about a former Confederate soldier who won't rejoin the Union after the Civil War, so he heads west and lives among the Sioux.  China Gate was a Fox picture following a French legionnaire bomb squad through Indochina during the rise of Ho Chih Minh - "the first time the name of the Vietnamese leader would be heard in an American movie."  How's this for a rootin'-tootin' chunk of description?

"The squad is lead by Brock, played by Gene Barry.  Brock is an American Korean War veteran who married Lea (Angie Dickinson) but abandoned her when his son was born with Chinese features.  Brock is a sonofabitch racist who gets some straight-shooting advice about Lea from the one-legged village priest, played by the veteran French actor Marcel Dalio."  (From Fuller's book.)

Fuller wasn't taking sides - "the Indochina conflict was based on nothing but goddamned economics" - and his legionnaires are multinational hired hands.  One of them is played by Nat King Cole, who worked for scale.  

Forty Guns (1957, 79 minutes)(buy/rent)

"Get a Doctor.  She'll Live"

The last of Fuller's films at Fox is an unexpectedly awesome Western.

A trio of brothers, led by legendary gunslinger Griff Bonnell (Barry Sullivan), ride into an Arizona town to deliver a warrant to a man working for the notorious Jessica Drummond (Barbara Stanwyck), "Boss of Cochise County."

Guns has much in common with Bamboo:  It deals with characters who suffer because they betray their own values, it works at undermining a genre, it has a plot that moves awkwardly and follows a path of convenience.  But every element is stronger.  The central concerns are vividly delivered and the contrivances can be enjoyably ridiculous.

Drummond's gang combines criminals and corrupt officials.  A ballad sung about her calls her the "high-ridin' woman with a whip" and declares that "if someone would break her and take her whip away... you might find that the woman with a whip is only a woman after all."  If that sounds insulting, and it probably should, it's because Fuller's messing with gender roles.  Drummond has sworn away love in favor of professional success.  The movie's in no mood to punish her for that.  It also doesn't punish her for having a rabid sexual appetite; her gang is an implied harem.  It's a rich character, and her backstory gives her a reason for a hardness.  Raped as a teenager ("I was bitten by a rattler in there when I was 15."  "Bet that rattler died."  "Bet he did.") and left to raise a kid brother by herself (she did poorly, providing Fuller a juvenile delinquent antagonist) she amassed influence and enjoys the fruits of her control.  But she falls in love, she loses that control.

Bonnell's dedication is to non-violence.  After developing a reputation for ruthlessness on the side of the law, he vowed to never kill again.  His trademark move in a gunfight is "the walk," where he refuses to draw until he's close enough to the other party to club them.  (It's silly, but well sold.)  He knows the Wild West is going to be tamed -- "The frontier is finished" -- and sees that as a positive.  He hates himself for having once been violent.  Trying to dissuade his brother from his business, he says, "I'm a freak, Chico!"  When he fails to do so, Chico asks, "Now what have I done wrong?"  Bonnell tells him, "Now you've killed a man."  A speech to Drummond:  "Last time I killed a man was ten years ago.  A boy.  He was no good, like your brother.  But he was still a boy, and I killed him."  Killing matters.  "One goddamned bullet has always been decisive," Fuller says in his book.

There are two surprising scenes of violence.  One interrupts a tender familial moment and leads to a lovely posed pan of a widow with a funeral carriage on a hill.  The other -- inspired by a standoff Fuller's squad faced in Aachen, Germany, where a group of SS started firing from behind women and children -- was supposed to be the film's final scene, but the studio forced the director to modify the ending.  "For Chrissakes, my gunman had to think about box-office receipts before he decided to pull the trigger!"  The change takes some edge off, but it still shocks; the tacked-on last scene is silly, but still works.

It's acceptable for the film to punish Drummond for falling in love -- by the end she's an embarrassing cliché, running around in a frilly frock, pining like a schoolgirl -- because it also punishes Bonnell.  He's forced to take out his weapon -- "You know why I hate getting into fights?  I can't miss." -- and readopt the brutish masculine bullshit he'd disavowed.  Each character violates their values, there's a real sense of loss as each gets robbed of earned complexity.

As serious as the film takes those characters' considerations of love and gunplay, it has no problem having heightened fun with sex and violence.  (Its chapter in A Third Face is called "Stuffed with Phalluses.")  There's a tongue-through-cheek scene where Stanwyck asks to see Bonnell's gun ("Can I feel it?" "It might go off in your face.") and a consummation episode that -- sure, why not -- involves a tornado.  A subplot sees one of Bonnell's brothers romancing a local female riflemaker.  "I never kissed a gunsmith before."  "Any recoil?"

40 Guns -- the third Fuller film to see release in 1957 -- was made on a "very short shooting schedule," but the man managed to fit in not only a natural disaster but two hilarious tracking shots.  One takes place in Drummond's dining room, where the size of her fairy tale following is emphasized.  The other stretches the entire length of the Western town that lived on Fox' back lot.  "The longest dolly shot in the history of the studio" starts at one corner of the block, upstairs in a hotel room, comes down the stairs and follows a long, dusty conversation to the other, ending when Stanwyck and her horde ride in.  "We got it in one take," the director said.  The scene where fifty-year-old Stanwyck had to be dragged by a horse?  That took three.  (She insisted on doing the stunt herself.)

And at this point I have to wonder what it is about Fuller and men bathing in tubs.  This is the third film -- after I Shot Jesse James and House of Bamboo (twice!) -- to feature scenes like this, and I'm not sure what to make of it.  I'd say it spoke to vulnerability -- James teased both the homoeroticism and foreshadowed the assassination, Bamboo used it to show a m/f couple bonding, and for a homoerotic assassination -- but here there's just a bunch of dirty guys riding into town wanting to get clean.  Fuller doesn't strike me as the OCD type, and another scene shows a cloud of dust rising when someone gets patted on the shoulder.  Does he want to emphasize how dirty we all are, and try not to be?  Also, look:

What are those dudes doing up there on the fence?  This ain't a spectator sport!

*

Verboten! (1958), shot for RKO, is set in post-war Germany and dealing with conflicts between US occupying forces, German civilians, and pockets of Hitler youth.  It's not on DVD.  Neither, currently, are the next two films -- they're scheduled to be released at the end of September as part of Sony's odd "Sam Fuller Film Collection" DVD Box Set.  (The seven-disc set only contains two films directed by Fuller, The Crimson Kimono and Underworld U.S.A.; also included are four films based on early Fuller screenplays and one based on Fuller's novel The Dark Page.)  But I have seen fuzzier versions of those...

The Crimson Kimono (1959, 82 minutes)(preorder)

"Maybe it's 5,000 years of blood behind me bursting to the front!"

While investigating a stripper's murder, a Japanese-American detective Joe Kojaku and his white partner Charlie Bancroft struggle over their feelings for an attractive witness.

This one is miserable.  The murder mystery is barely tangible enough to be an excuse, the weird idea that two detectives -- roommates and war buddies at that -- would use their own apartment as a safe house for a comely coed... y'know, whatever.

Another interracial romance, and Fuller had to fight with the studio over whether a white woman could choose an Asian-American man over a white guy.  (Fuller's version of Columbia chief Sam Briskin's plea:  "That's gonna be hard for average American audiences to swallow... Can't you make the white guy a little bit of a sonofabitch?")  The marketing campaign included the phrase "WHY DOES SHE CHOOSE A JAPANESE LOVER?"

Instead of developing an interesting love triangle, Fuller decided to throw another curveball by introducing the element of reverse racism.  When Bancroft isn't overjoyed that his partner has stolen his girlfriend, Kojaku insists that it's because his best friend isn't jealous, he's racist.

The film's heavy on talky-talky (and apple eating, as if the plot needed fiber or something).  A bohemian barfly artist named "Mac" is supposed to be amusing.  (Both female characters have male names, for whatever reason; coed Christine is always addressed as "Chris.")  Two good things:  A scene after the partners blow up where Kojaku scowls with self-hatred at Japanese-American children wearing traditional dress; patient time spent around LA's Little Tokyo (this was, according to Fuller, the first film to be shot there), including a parade climax where the soundtrack mashes marching band and Japanese music.

Fuller gets defensive about this "minor" film in his book, starting its chapter explaining that he turned down a number of A pictures because  "making less expensive movies meant maintaining my independence... Maybe it was a fatal career flaw, but small-budget independence was more appealing to me than all thunder of major productions."  That's great, but this picture is no convincing argument.  Fuller also points out that his Asian-Caucasian romance was released the same year as Hiroshima, Mon Amour; one of those films is a classic.

Underworld, U.S.A. (1961, 99 minutes)(preorder)

"Yeah, I learned a lesson.  I learned plenty."

Better, thanks to its single-mindedness and a great, eccentric performance by Cliff Robertson.  A two-bit hood exacts revenge on the three mobsters who killed his father.

The credited source for this project -- Columbia had the rights to a magazine article explaining the operations of national crime syndicates -- provides its most dated aspect.  Even though Fuller himself brags about "facts" in the film's trailer (and emphasizes the IN YOUR FACE nature by pushing in at the end of almost every third shot), simply iterating that gangsters practice intimidation and shield themselves by buying corrupt officials and shrouding themselves in legitimacy doesn't cut it in a post-Scorsese/Pileggi world.  And the whole spiel about them targeting the Youth of America (branding!), no matter how intelligent or accurate, is communicated in a way that comes off as Reefer Madness-style paranoia.  Teen dopers!  Schoolgirl hookers!

Fuller's original opening -- a to-the-camera call to legalize prostitution (!) which was to end with the sex worker spokeswoman getting her head blown off by organized crime (!) -- might have made that aspect more, um, interesting.

His real inspirations, he says, were Dumas' Count of Monte Cristo and the spirit of Jean Genet.  Robertson's character, Tolly, integrates himself into both the mobsters' organization and the police investigation into it, only cooperating so far as it gets him closer to rubbing out his targets.  His revenge is so hard-driven that morality isn't even a speed bump.

The plotting makes things convenient for him, and isn't always exciting.  (Fuller, natch, puts his unlikeable hero behind a typewriter at one point.)  The oversimplification makes the nation's biggest crime bosses seem an easily toppled lot; despite having a framework that devotes time to each of the three main villains, they aren't given any distinguishing characteristics or specific flaws that contribute to their toppling.  But you start to rationalize that Tolly's determination has a gravitational force that dehumanizes his targets and bends events to his will.  Likewise, a tossed-together relationship with an alcoholic prostitute -- "Cuddles" (Dolores Dorn), whose disposition isn't that different from Piper Laurie's lush in The Hustler, even though her education is -- is acknowledged as a convenience.  They are two people who have to settle for each other.

Fuller preserves the traditional gangster film ending because it makes sense in his world.  Violence begets violence.  The last we see of Tolly is his clenched fist.  

Merrill's Marauders (1962, 98 minutes)(buy/rent)

"Did Lemcheck make it?"

In 1944, the 5307th Composite (provisional), an all-volunteer unit of battle-hardened veterans under the command of Brigadier General Frank Merrill, was ordered to march 1,000 miles behind enemy lines without air or artillery support in an effort to surprise the Japanese and re-take Burma.  Of the 2,750 soldiers to began the campaign, only 130 were still considered combat-effective by end of operation, only two came through without ever being hospitalized for injury or illness.

This is that story.  It's not the WWII movie Fuller wanted to make -- he wanted to make his own -- but he was convinced by Warner Brothers to take the assignment as a dry run that could put Fuller in position to make The Big Red One.

As I said before, I don't have much experience with gung-ho war films.  This starts as if this might have been one of those, an inspirational (in so far as the mission was a success, patriotic heroism, etc.) true life story with lots of charging extras and boom-boom-boom.  (Some action scenes were apparently culled from other films.)  We join the unit long after their march has been underway, and there's so much talking up of crazy that it seems like the movie's introducing insanity as an obstacle to be surmounted.  "Sneaking 3,000 men through this damned jungle's gonna drive me nuts!" says Merrill (Jeff Chandler); the medic echoes that they're "3,000 nervous wrecks."  There's already someone who engages in extensive conversations with a mule.  "90 days and 90 nights, bellying behind Japanese lines, afraid to talk, afraid to breathe."

But Fuller doesn't relent, and the second act is a big crazy Wow that could easily be seen as a precursor to Apocalypse Now.  Conditions are talked up, the starvation and disease, but it becomes clear that the situation that's insane is war itself.  A battle in this striking maze that, from above, looks like concrete flowers -- shot in the Philippines, these were supports for absent fuel tanks -- makes it impossible to see who's killing whom. (The studio considered it too artistic and ordered someone else to go back and shoot close-ups, but according to Fuller, "Only one brief sequence of the second-unit stuff ended up in the final cut... And anyway, what's so wrong with looking 'artistic,' goddamnit?")  There's a severe mountainside route that makes jumping to your death seem sane.

We're constantly confronted by death, not as part of some brave act, but as piles of corpses and paperwork.  One series of shots follows a pair of men carrying an injured soldier on a stretcher through landscapes strewn with bodies, so many that it seems absurd that this one could be worth saving.  (The sequence ends with them marching straight toward diffused sunlight, it's almost religious.)  Perhaps the most heartbreaking scene comes after a battle in a village; when the residents come out and start wordlessly caring for the soldiers and giving them rice, Claude Akins (yes, TV's Sheriff Lobo) just starts weeping.  Kindness is so alien a thing.

It's an immensely effective middle, designed to overwhelm objectives and accomplishments and smother any notion of patriotism.  And indeed, the victory at the end of the picture was so muted that Warner's slapped on a few seconds of completely incongruous parade footage and a booming voice-over:  "But they did it!  They did the impossible!"  Yeah, sure, but Jesus.

The film made money and got good reviews and Warner's bought Fuller a Cadillac.  But they did not give him the nod on The Big Red One.  He'd turn away from the studio system to make two iconic films.

Shock Corridor (1963, 101 minutes)(buy/rent)

"Somebody do something about my head!"

Pulitzer-craving crime reporter Johnny Barrett (Peter Breck) gets himself committed to solve a murder in an asylum.

Second time I've seen this and it works even better in context of this marathon.  Fuller pitched this to Fritz Lang in the 40s as a drama about patient abuse called Straitjacket, but the German director wanted to swap genders and didn't see a problem keeping the scene where the reporter winds up trapped in a room full of agitated members of the opposite sex.  Sensitive!  Fuller would later make a film that both boldly captured its time and neatly incorporated elements from his body of work.

Shock Corridor -- like Underworld, U.S.A. -- has three episodes contained within Johnny's framing structure.  Functionally, three inmates witnessed the murder, and Johnny buddies up to them to assemble their stories into a conclusion.  But to do so he has to play along with their psychoses, all identity related.  He's forced to dive into the biggest cracks the country has.

The first witness -- Stuart (James Best), a Southern man who became a Communist collaborator during the Korean War -- has absolved himself by retreating to a time when he could be proudly Anti-American:  He is now General "Jeb" Stuart of the Confederacy.  The second, Trent (Hari Rhodes), was a black student placed on the frontlines of desegregation.  His higher education was a process of constant hatred; he has consumed that and reimagined himself as a lily-white Klansman.  The third, Boden (Gene Evans), is a nuclear scientist who has ducked and covered into his inner six year-old.  He spends most of his time in the company of crayons.

Each witness has a convenient moment of clarity where he gets to explain himself.  Fuller gives Stuart, the traitor, a place in the director's own regiment, the 1st, and honors him with the beloved "dogface" title lowly infantrymen shared.  The Southerner jumped sides, we're told, because he was taught to hate his country.  Like the ninnies currently showing up and shouting down Town Hall meetings, he was nursed on a spew of fear and bigotry, bred to blindly go against things, never to listen and understand them.  "Not once did [my parents] make me feel proud of where I was born.  See, that was the cancer they put in me.  No knowledge of my country... no pride... just a hymn of hate."  A big switch from the self-interested secrets-sellers in Pick Up on South Street, whom Fuller saw as sane realists surviving against a backdrop of inane idealism, and I doubt lack of civic pride typically leads to dissociative disorders.  Best is very sympathetic, but the problem with this segment is that a real vein of dissension would peak in another half-decade, and when the country went full-on schizo things couldn't be blamed on poor conditioning.

Rhodes' outsized charisma allows him to become both ferocious ("America for Americans!   Black bombs for black foreigners!") and satirical (Spying another black inmate poised to drink from a water fountain, he yells, "Let's get him before he marries my daughter!"  Also:  "They're all right as entertainers, but...") and he delivers his epithets with evil conviction.  It's an effective turn of inside-out minstrelsy (while again touching on Kimono's racial self-hatred).  Trent's scene of sanity comes when he's straightjacketed.  "It's a blessing to love my country -- even when it gives me ulcers."

Boden's segment is short and self-evident.  It's good to see Evans again, his first (and I think final) appearance in a Fuller film since a bit part in Hell and High Water.  Fuller doesn't mention in his book why the man he called "his good luck charm" early on disappeared from his work for such a stretch.  But he fits in here, he's something from Fuller's attic.  The "moments of clarity" are accompanied by grainy color footage - personal stock the director shot while scouting locations for House of Bamboo and Tigrero.  Behind Johnny Barrett's editor's desk is a political cartoon featuring the Statue of Liberty, like the one in Park Row.

Johnny's given Fuller's journalism bio -- copyboy at 14, etc -- and the film's most curious role.  Shock Corridor's plot is best approached as pure contrivance, another too-easy assimilation thing like Bamboo or Underworld.  The murder itself is a sort of MacGuffin, just an excuse to hit elements A, B, and C, and it's unfortunate that at the end Fuller feels he has to deal with it.  (He comes up with a single interesting plot complication, but even if the asylum is "America," Cuckoo's Nest notions of authority are underdeveloped.)  But if we don't care about the murder by the end of the film maybe it's because we're not sure one ever happened.

Because Johnny is mad and belongs exactly where he puts himself.

If the Unreliable Narrator seems like an unlikely sophistication for a Fuller picture -- and it's not, see Steel Helmet -- it could just be an unintended byproduct of Corridor's own crazy.  Here's the scheme Barrett cooks up to get himself committed:  He has his stripper girlfriend pose as his sister and report him to the cops for having a perverted interest in her ponytail.  Seriously.  Barrett studies under a psychiatric coach (friend of his editor, they were Asian-American/Caucasian war buddies, a la Crimson Kimono) to convincingly portray a "fetishist" on a "sexual power-kick."  There's concern throughout that just being in an asylum will make him crack up, but isn't he sort of cracked at the start?  Stripper girlfriend?  Ponytail fetish?  Go undercover in an asylum?

Barrett does suffer inside.  There's electro-shock treatment, and that Bacchae sequence (silly at first - "Nymphos!" - then sort of creepy), and even the suggestion that early on he's violated by a fellow inmate.  Not long into his internment he's fantasizing about his girlfriend, who appears as a tiny superimposed figure who teases him with her hair.  But an early strip tease sequence where the gf sings about love is shot in such a stylized way that we're unsure whether it's real or not.  It starts with her wrapped in a boa so she looks like Cousin It, the stage is deep and dark and we aren't shown any crowd.  For some reason I immediately associated the dance with the Lady in the Radiator in Eraserhead.

 

The black-and-white cinematography is courtesy of Stanley Cortez (Magnificent Ambersons, Night of the Hunter) and it's appropriately heavy on harsh single-sourced light and strong shadows.

If this is a totally subjective film, instead of an intermittently subjective one (the home movie footage, the fantastic climax (which, shot at the end of production, totally destroyed the film's sets)) then Barrett might not be any kind of reporter, there might not have been a murder at all. (The film's trailer doesn't even mention it!  It was sold as pure exploitation, its lead sold as suffering psychotic.)  Caligari, but without the whacked-out art direction.  Not helping matters is Breck's performance, which is so unconvincing that the other actors look surprised they're committing this guy.

If this is not a totally subjective film, there's a problem with the Barrett framing device.  We're only given a practical reason for his insanity:  He goes insane because he's in an insane place.  We certainly shouldn't expect serious psychology.  But how to make this jibe with the allegorical premise, the three symbolic nutcases, and the fact the film is bookended by the Euripides quote, "Those whom God wishes to destroy he first makes mad?"  Does simply glancing into the cracks caused by conflicted nationalism, racism, and technology make Barrett mad?  Or is he supposed to symbolize something else crazy about our national situation?  Overzealous ambition?  Fake incestuous ponytail fetishism?

But there's no need to make anything make any sense.  Aside from the battlefield, a madhouse might be the perfect setting for a Fuller film.  This is rightly known as a masterpiece - it has been enshrined in the Library of Congress' Film Registry, was an early addition to The Criterion Collection (jack shit in the way of extras, btw) - but it's a Fuller-style masterpiece, fast and cheap, blunt and hot.

And yes, there's guys in bathtubs, this time in the name of "hydrotherapy."

It was the first of two independents financed by real estate magnate Samuel Firks, with whom Fuller was hoping to have a Lippert-like partnership:  Low budgets, creative freedom, shared profits.  Shock Corridor came in for pennies, went out as its director intended it, got good notices and box office.  Fuller would not see the money.

The Naked Kiss (1964, 91 minutes)(buy/rent)

"Nobody shoves dirty money in my mouth!"

A big city prostitute (Constance Towers, Shock Corridor's stripper girlfriend) runs from her pimp and tries to start life anew in a small town.

Also considered a B-movie classic, this one has a few shocks and some fantastic moments (a storytelling fantasy is unexpected magic), but didn't hold up as well for me.  Some of it's the obviousness that Fuller's Grantville will wind up full of dark secrets and hypocrisy - it's strange to go to Lynch again, but I get the feeling he saw and liked this one a lot, and it's hard not to think of One-Eyed Jacks when we go to the brothel outside town limits.  Some of it's my resistance to Fuller's ridiculousness - his hooker doesn't just have a heart of gold, she becomes a glowing angelic nurse inspiring multiracial handicapped children, she quotes Goethe.  Sometimes extremes are played pointedly to accentuate contrasts, but the point is stuck in your eye and comes out the back of your head.  Of course when The Perfect Man - wealthy, cultured, philanthropic - comes along, the harder he falls.  And when Fuller works his plot to a point where real things like "the law" come into play, he gets bored and piles on unlikelihoods.

Sometimes it's just bad.  Here is an actual exchange:

"I have something from Venice I believe you will like..."

"Thank you!"

"Venetian, 17th century."

"From Venice!"

Ugh.

But then there's this speech our heroine gives a girl about to enter the world's oldest profession:  "[You'll be] sleeping on the skin of a nightmare for the rest of your life... You'll meet men you'll live on and men who live on you.  And those are the only men you'll ever meet.  You'll be every man's wife-in-law and no man's wife... Why, your world will become so warped you'll hate all men and you'll hate yourself because you'll become  a social problem, a medical problem, a mental problem, and a despicable failure as a woman."

Fuller has no romantic (or for that matter, progressive) view of prostitution; in his book he describes having a brothel as a base of operations when he was a crime journalist.  And his Kelly is a strong (though romanticized) character, both smart and street smart.  An early liaison with a Grantville policeman is both subtle and severe as the two try to figure whether they'll be enemies or partners.  Towers looks good in the role because she's not stunning, and she's got great presence; unfortunately, she's very much a soap opera actress.  The role's already outsized, and overplaying things just makes things feel more ridiculous.

Underneath the melodrama, though, there's something sad and quiet.  A movie that wants us to acknowledge that no matter how hard a person tries to do good work, the world will only see them as the sum of their mistakes.

Of course it is a movie called The Naked Kiss, and a movie whose trailer promised "BRUTALLY BARE EMOTIONAL VIOLENCE."    This is a ripe and damaged movie about ripe and damaged people.

tags: samuel fuller  movie reviews  

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