The Films of Samuel Fuller. Lisa Dombrowski
and has to sit at the back of the public bus. Thompson agrees, but says, “A hundred years ago I couldn’t even ride in a bus. At least now I can sit in the back. Maybe in fifty years I’ll sit in the middle, and some day up front. There’s some things you just can’t rush, buster.” As Thompson is one of the most sympathetic characters in the film up to this point, you might expect his perspective on race relations to carry more visual weight than that of the POW. Yet the scene stylistically favors neither soldier. In a sequence shot, the camera tracks 180 degrees from one man to the other, unmotivated by character movement. First one soldier, then the other is favored with frontality as he states his position. With no stylistic tools emphasizing either character’s speech, the viewer is encouraged to consider each in turn, perhaps to the point of acknowledging that the POW makes a certain amount of sense. Here Fuller is exposing the contradictions of America, a country still failing to live up to its credo that all are created equal. Such an explicit examination of a contemporary social problem is new to Fuller’s directorial palette. While the occasion for the discussion is causally motivated by the medic attending to the POW’s injury, the direction of their conversation and the singularly evenhanded yet unmotivated camera movement distance the scene from the rest of the film and mark it as a self-consciously ambiguous moment.
The POW’s discussion with Tanaka, a second-generation Japanese-American, features a different visual presentation but functions similarly, again highlighting the irony of fighting for a country that denies your basic rights. Almost immediately following the scene with Thompson, the camera tilts down to frame Tanaka and the POW sitting next to each other in a two-shot. The POW notes, “You’ve got the same kind of eyes I have…. They hate us because of our eyes.” Tanaka replies with a sleepy brush-off, but the POW gets his attention when he asks if Tanaka’s family was among the Japanese-Americans who were interned in camps during WWII—a shameful event in American history rarely mentioned in movies of this period. The POW’s question is punctuated by a cut in to an unusually tight close-up of his face, beginning a pattern of cuts between extreme close-ups of each man as he speaks. While the scene contains more conventional analytical editing than the sequence with the African-American medic, its visual construction again emphasizes both men’s comments equally. Tanaka admits that his family was detained, but that he nevertheless fought in the war for the United States. When the POW questions why Tanaka fought overseas after being called a “dirty Jap rat” at home, the veteran replies, “I’m an American. When we get pushed around at home, that’s our business.” The scene’s proximity to the POW’s conversation with the medic and its evenhanded visual presentation again draw attention to the POW’s argument, but Tanaka’s casual dismissal of him (“Don’t you guys know when you’re licked?”) betrays no particular concern. As before, Fuller brings front and center questions regarding what it means to be an American and to fight for one’s country.
The pointed discussion of race in these scenes, their unusual visual presentation, and their singularity in the film—the POW does not question any other members of the platoon—all contribute to their self-consciousness. Set apart from the rest of the narrative, these scenes encourage viewers to think. While the POW’s words are, on one level, true, we have seen the bravery and intelligence of Thompson and Tanaka and how they are respected by the rest of the men. Within the platoon, they are fully integrated, measured by their talent and experience, not by the color of their skin. In The Steel Helmet, it is the platoon—not the home front—that demonstrates why we fight, that illustrates the possibility of a just and equal America.
In order to provide viewers with a sense of what a footsoldier experiences during war, Fuller had to do more than rework genre conventions: he had to reconstruct how we watch a war film.
You can’t make a real war picture, because the audience can get up and go buy their popcorn at any time. They’re never hurt. And war means casualties. The best way would be to occasionally fire at them from behind the screen during a battle scene! No, really, I’m not joking about this.… If someone, once in a while, was hit, that would give the audience a feeling for the tension of war.32
The tension of war—the numbing anxiety evoked by unexpected outbreaks of violence, of fatigue interrupted by death—is what Fuller attempts to suggest in The Steel Helmet, structuring the episodic narrative so as create abrupt shifts in tone and alternating sequences of suspense and surprise. The opening scene telegraphs these strategies. As the film’s credits come to an end, superimposed over a steel helmet with a bullet hole in it, the helmet unexpectedly tilts up, and two suspicious eyes peer out to survey the landscape. The movement takes us by surprise, as the bullet hole and the helmet’s immobility previously led us to assume that the helmet’s owner was dead. Our curiosity regarding the soldier’s survival quickly turns to suspense, however, as shots of the soldier crawling forward with his hands bound behind his back are intercut with shots of advancing bare feet and a dangling rifle. The sense of an impending threat is heightened through the heavy violin strings on the soundtrack, and we know the soldier has not escaped death yet—though he himself remains unaware. A tilt up the body of the interloper reveals a child’s face, but our momentary relief is checked when he leans over the soldier with a knife. As we wonder if this child is a North Korean out to finish the job, the music comes to a halt, and the child quickly cuts the soldier’s ropes rather than his throat. Fuller could have shot this scene through the perspective of the bound soldier, whom we will soon come to know as Zack, our protagonist. But by providing us at times with more information than Zack, Fuller encourages us to feel not only Zack’s relief at being saved, but also the anxiety of knowing he may as easily have been killed. This play between restricted and unrestricted narration continues throughout the film, binding the viewer less to Zack’s particular experience than to the overall tension inherent to war.
The irony resulting from the opening sequence—a potential North Korean killer is revealed to be a friendly and helpful South Korean child—is replayed throughout the film, as sequences with perceived threats unfold harmlessly while scenes seemingly empty of threat wind up being deadly. This pattern of alternating sequences of relative calm with moments of unexpected violence becomes the dominant structural strategy in the film, constantly catching viewers off guard and teaching us to imagine the uncertainty faced by soldiers in combat. In the rest of the first act, the pattern is repeated when a group of civilians praying at an altar pull rifles from their robes and open fire on Zack and Short Round; when snipers suddenly attack after Zack and Thompson initially part ways with the platoon; and then again on the road, after a protracted sequence of calm is followed by an explosion just as the rest of the men are sitting down and eating watermelon. That an American soldier is killed taking the dog tags off the corpse of a fellow infantryman makes the moment even more ironic—it is the soldier’s kindness that gets him killed. As the platoon establishes an observation post in the temple during the second act, a series of comic bits with Joe, the mule driver who does not talk, again establish a carefree tone. The lighthearted mood is then undercut when the North Korean kills Joe, initiating a new line of action as the soldiers hunt for the killer. Finally, after the North Korean is caught, the third act begins with Zack, Short Round, and the POW preparing to leave the temple. It would appear that the enemy threat to the soldiers has been removed, but cutaways to a sniper setting up outside the temple suggest that the platoon is unknowingly in for a final battle, establishing a mood of suspense. Nevertheless, even though the shot of the sniper informs us of a threat, the offscreen death of Short Round is deeply shocking, as the death of a child mascot, especially one so pure and good-hearted, goes so firmly against classical Hollywood conventions. But Fuller doesn’t let up: Zack’s subsequent shooting of the POW delivers another unexpected blow, raising the specter of American soldiers engaging in war crimes. These final acts of startling violence precipitate the massive bombardment of the temple by the enemy, the death of most of the platoon, and the unraveling of Sergeant Zack’s mind. The sudden and ironic shifts between moments of calm and violence in The Steel Helmet exemplify the stark contrasts in tone and action that pervade Fuller’s work. The unexpected appearance of violence shocks and surprises the viewer, who is left uncertain of when and where to expect the next threat. The narrative structure thereby offers viewers a distant sense of the tension felt by soldiers in war without requiring gunfire in the theater.