The Films of Samuel Fuller. Lisa Dombrowski
Fuller in Sicily during World War II, flanked by a pack mule and a young boy. Mules and children pop up in almost every Fuller combat film. Chrisam Films, Inc.
The years Fuller spent in Hollywood immediately after the war taught him the importance of acquiring production control over his own stories. The screen rights to The Dark Page had been purchased by Howard Hawks; Hawks later sold the rights to the newspaper murder mystery, which Phil Karlson eventually directed as Scandal Sheet (1952). Three different studios then hired Fuller to write original scripts, all of which exhibited the hard-boiled sensationalism characteristic of his later films and none of which were produced. Despite concerns regarding the controversial nature of his stories, Fuller remained in demand as a screenwriter, even resisting a contract offer from MGM in the hope that he might be able to direct his scripts the way he wanted. Finally, in 1948, Fuller received a phone call from Robert Lippert, a West Coast exhibitor and independent producer, who offered him the opportunity to helm his own feature.
Over the next sixteen years, Samuel Fuller made seventeen films, operating both as a contract director and as an independent producer, much like fellow action experts Robert Aldrich and Anthony Mann. He wrote and directed three low-budget films for Lippert Productions, eventually receiving producer status and significant production autonomy: I Shot Jesse James (1949), a psychological western; The Baron of Arizona (1950), based on the true story of a nineteenth-century forger; and The Steel Helmet (1951), the first Korean War picture released in the United States. The astounding critical and commercial success of The Steel Helmet catapulted Fuller to the attention of the major studios as a hot new director of action genres.
The creative energy of production head Darryl Zanuck drew Fuller to Twentieth Century–Fox, where he signed an option contract as a director and screenwriter. Fuller wrote the original script for Fixed Bayonets (1951), his second Korean War picture, but shared screenwriting credit on his subsequent directorial efforts at the studio: Pickup on South Street (1953), a gritty espionage and crime thriller; Hell and High Water (1954), a submarine adventure; and House of Bamboo (1955), a cops-and-robbers picture set in Tokyo. While on leave from Fox, Fuller produced, wrote, directed, and completely self-financed Park Row (1952), a sentimental yet raucous view of the newspaper business in late-nineteenth-century New York City. Though he mounted an extensive promotional campaign, the picture flopped.
In 1956, after Fuller parted ways with Fox, he established Globe Enterprises, an independent production company, and initiated a series of financing and distribution deals with RKO, Fox, and Columbia. In addition to two failed television pilots, Fuller wrote, directed, and produced six films under the Globe banner: Run of the Arrow (1957), China Gate (1957), Forty Guns (1957), Verboten! (1959), The Crimson Kimono (1959), and Underworld, U.S.A. (1961). Following the collapse of Globe, Fuller worked as a freelance director on the World War II combat picture Merrill’s Marauders (1962); he subsequently wrote and directed two adult exploitation films for Allied Artists, Shock Corridor (1963) and The Naked Kiss (1964), neither of which produced sizable domestic returns. In 1965, Fuller left Hollywood for Paris to write and direct a science-fiction adaptation of Aristophanes’s Lysistrata, but the film never got off the ground. Unable to acquire financing for independent production in the United States and finding freelance directing work only on television, Fuller increasingly immersed himself in his writing.
Although he wrote countless scripts and treatments over the next twenty years, Fuller directed only six subsequent films and disowned one of them: Shark! (1969, from which he removed his name after losing control of the editing), Dead Pigeon on Beethoven Street (1972), The Big Red One, White Dog (1982), Thieves After Dark (1984), and Street of No Return (1989). Ironically, his production decline was accompanied by his critical ascension, and young directors such as Wim Wenders and the Kaurismäki brothers kept him busy throughout the 1970s and 1980s with acting jobs in their movies. Even as Fuller struggled to find financing and distribution for his films, his difficulties only further clinched his reputation as a rebel, one too challenging to be embraced by Hollywood studios. After a debilitating stroke, Fuller died in 1997 at age eighty-five.
While Fuller’s biography has played a dominant role in critical assessments of his work, early characterizations of him as an artistic primitive and a Hollywood outsider have also proven a resilient part of his biographical legend. Critics in the 1950s and 1960s associated the seemingly untutored visual quality and emotional authenticity apparent in several of Fuller’s films with a primitive approach to filmmaking, a notion that in one form or another dominates discussions of his work to this day. In addition, beginning in the 1960s, newspaper profiles highlighted Fuller’s struggles as a low-budget independent producer and developed his reputation as a maverick. Through repetition over time, the labels of “primitive” and “indie maverick” have become the primary touchstones for critical discussions of Fuller.
Critics who draw on the concept of the primitive to describe Fuller’s style typically aim to valorize his often nonclassical aesthetic. According to one definition, a “primitive” artwork that appears instinctive and immediate rather than carefully constructed according to classical rules acquires an aura of primal emotion, sincerity, and originality.6 It is precisely this notion of simplicity and spontaneity as more emotionally compelling than the normative style of classical cinema that many critics respond to in Fuller’s work. In a 1959 Cahiers du Cinéma article, Luc Moullet initiated the critical association of Fuller with the term by describing him as an “intelligent primitive.” Fuller’s ignorance of film school conventions and reliance on his own instincts, Moullet argued, enable him to produce a vision of life more spontaneous and real than rule-bound classical cinema.7 In later years, film critics following in Moullet’s footsteps—such as Andrew Sarris, Manny Farber, and Jean-Pierre Coursodon—continued to use “primitive” and the concepts associated with it to describe Fuller’s movies.8 For these critics, Fuller’s stylistic unpredictability is a characteristic worth celebrating and is what links him to primitives in other art forms.
In a related argument, J. Hoberman more recently considered Fuller as a pioneer “abstract sensationalist,” one of several twentieth-century American artists versed in the trashy aesthetic of the tabloids. Hoberman describes the abstract sensationalist as a typically untrained artist who produces sensational work for a mass audience. In particular, he focuses on how abstract sensationalists embrace the tabloid aesthetic of “shock, raw sensation and immediate impact, a prole expression of violent contrasts and blunt, ‘vulgar’ stylization.”9 In championing Fuller as a rough-edged producer of urban, low art, Hoberman highlights the same aesthetic traits seized on by those who have labeled the director a primitive.
However they appropriate or alter the meaning of the term, critics who evoke the primitive to describe Fuller and his work participate in a critical tradition that values an artist’s rejection of classical norms. The longstanding association of the primitive with the instinctual, however, can unfairly characterize artists who produce primitive work as acting without conscious thought or training. As Paul Klee noted, “If my works sometimes produce a primitive impression, this ‘primitiveness’ is explained by my discipline, which consists of reducing everything to a few steps. It is no more than economy; that is the ultimate professional awareness, which is to say the opposite of real primitiveness.”10 In distinguishing between the impression that is created by the final work and the thought that goes into an artist’s working process, Klee rightly cautions against confusing the appearance of simplicity in an artwork with a lack of intention. This caution is particularly appropriate when considering a medium such as film, which requires the coordination of masses of people, equipment, and money. Simply because an artist creates a stripped-down, anticlassical, emotionally raw work does not imply that he or she is working from instinct alone. As subsequent sections of this introduction illustrate, Fuller’s impulses often challenged classical conventions and produced an appearance of spontaneity, yet his working methods and artistic strategies were quite deliberate. Casting Fuller as a primitive simply does not do justice to the complexity and contradictions evident within his work.
In addition to the “primitive” nature of his films, Fuller’s reputation as an independent filmmaker