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Feb 23, 2017

By the time Sam Fuller directed his first film at the age of thirty-six, he’d already lived three lives: as a journalist, a novelist, and an infantryman. By spinning his newsroom and frontline experiences into his movies, Fuller developed a unique cinematic voice that was complex and sophisticated, at times brutish and raw, though always truthful and personal. Fuller himself was a character only he could script—a magnanimous storyteller who spoke with brutal clarity and urgency (usually with a cigar clenched tightly in his teeth), relating to those around him as if they were comrades in a foxhole fighting deadlines, Nazi Germany, or studios unwilling to cooperate with his vision. What he once said about the writer he most admired, Balzac, Fuller could have said about himself: “He lived his stories.”

Samuel Michael Fuller was born in Worcester, Massachusetts, on August 12, 1912. Legend has it that he was mute for the first five years of his life, an ironic beginning for a man who would later be known for his loquaciousness. His father died when he was ten, and a year later he moved with his mother to New York City, where he immersed himself in the world of tabloid journalism—his first great influence.

At twelve, lying about his age, Fuller got an after-school job working for the legendary editor Arthur Brisbane in the “morgue” (filing room) of the New York Evening Journal, a Hearst publication. He remained Brisbane’s personal copy boy till he reached seventeen, when he quit to become the youngest crime reporter on staff at the New York Evening Graphic. But when an editor at the Graphic talked the young Fuller into bringing a photographer to school with him to expose a supposed sex scandal, his high school principal expelled him, bringing a premature end to any thoughts of an academic career. Not that it mattered to Fuller: “He made me very happy because that meant a day job.”

In 1930, Fuller was the youngest crime reporter at the New York newspaper the Graphic. His interest in the underbelly of society, which began at a young age, would inspire his yarns and movies later in life. In the photo above, he sits at his desk, just around the corner from the men’s bathroom, in a room full of hundreds of reporters. The headshot on the wall is that of celebrated Broadway actress Jeanne Eagels. A year earlier, acting on a hot tip about a mysterious corpse at a prestigious Manhattan funeral parlor, Fuller scooped all the other New York papers by being the first to report her untimely drug overdose at the age of thirty-five. Fuller has said “her talent was like a shimmering diamond that transfixes your eyes on its brilliance,” and “Through her, I understood for the first time the quicksand nature of fame.”

As a reporter (he also did double-duty as a political cartoonist), Fuller covered murders, riots, and executions, witnessing firsthand the darkest depths of society—something that would stay with him the rest of his life. It was newspapering that taught him the importance of the splashy front-page hook, the big finish, and the techniques of agitprop yellow journalism. “There are two types of yellow journalism. One is the subject matter of the story—there is no way to change it! That makes it yellow journalism! Sex! Orgy! Murder! Whether it’s the New York Times, the London Times, or the Guardian in England, they can’t change the word ‘sex’ or ‘orgy,’ but the language approach lifts that up. The other one doesn’t sell, except for one word when it happens: peace. That’s at the end of war. But the most important word, for a newspaper, is: War! You get people by the balls.”

The attention-grabbing headlines that were a staple of the newspaper wars became standard practice in Fuller’s films—an explosive opening fastening the spectator to the screen, demanding audience participation, and creating anticipation for more. In the 1996 documentary The Typewriter, the Rifle and the Movie Camera, director Martin Scorsese notes that Fuller’s newspaper history “gives him authority and a sense of a person who can tell a story, who can cut right to the quick of it. . . . He’s got to tell the story and he’s got to tell it fast. He’s got to hook you. He has to hook you with the headline, he has to hook you with the prose.”

“Cinema-fist” is how writer Peter Wollen, borrowing from Sergei Eisenstein, described the frontal assault of Fuller’s style, and, as Lee Server notes in his book Sam Fuller: Film Is a Battleground, “ . . . all of Fuller’s films can be viewed in newspaper terms, with their abundance of graphics (headlines, mottoes, epigraphs, datelines, etc.), the ‘front page’ premises, war reporting, exposés, didactic editorials, investigative journalism, and perhaps a bit of the bluntness of the ‘funny pages.’”

Fuller believed in the integrity of the reporter, and that good reporting was the closest possible account of reality, a trait he wanted to bring to the screen: “I had one advantage—I was brought up on fact. There’s one big difference. When something is factual, it’s called the truth. I write the truth.” Fuller eventually left the newspaper business, but his favorite film remained Park Row (1952), set in New York’s nineteenth-century newspaper district, and throughout his life he continually entertained the idea of starting his own newspaper.

It was during the end of his newspaper years in the thirties that Fuller began writing pulp novels and screenplays. Among the novels he wrote are his first, Burn, Baby, Burn (1935), and the best-known, The Dark Page (1944). His first screenplay to become a film (cowritten with Edmund Wilson) was 1936’s Hats Off. Over the next thirteen years, eight more of Fuller’s screenplays would be produced.

But when the U.S. entered World War II in December 1941, Fuller enlisted in the Army and was assigned to the Sixteenth Infantry Regiment of the First Division, “The Big Red One.” He would spend over three years on the frontlines, and this experience, chronicled in The Big Red One (1980), would prove to be the second major influence on his life. He fought in some of the bloodiest campaigns of the war in North Africa and Italy, and landed on the beaches of Normandy in the D-Day invasion. After the liberation of Paris, he marched into Germany and was among the first to witness the horrors of Hitler’s death camps. The moment is depicted in The Big Red One when Pvt. Griff – 1st Squad (Mark Hamill), after opening a still-smoking oven door, responds to what he sees inside by firing round after round with his rifle into a single SS soldier until he realizes he’s run out of bullets. As Fuller explains the moment: “ . . . it is the first time he realizes what the hell he is fighting for. Griff is fighting a very evil thing called Kill; that’s Hitler . . . And you cannot sit at a table with Mr. Kill and discuss any deal—it is impossible. You have to resort to his goddamn level and kill his soldiers, and if possible, kill him. You have to kill Kill, and the idiocy of it is, when it is all over, you can’t tell who really won, or who really lost.”

Fuller’s 1959 film about the aftermath of war, Verboten!, is fueled by his passion to never forget what he had seen in the death camps. His wartime journals are filled with entries ranging from simple day-to-day reports such as “Sgt. Witherspoon puts Lt. Clark, Mess Lt., on K.P. because chow was late,” to combat details like “fire, mortars, shelling all nite,” to notes and ideas for various films—“donkey lapping axle grease from cart wheel, Joe in charge of donkey, never talks”—that include characters and scenes that would later be used in The Big Red One and The Steel Helmet (1951). In tone and style, the journals read like Fuller’s screenplays, juxtaposing the mundane with the political, brutal harshness with moments of lightness and humanity. His war films never shied away from the violence inherent in combat. Feeling that Hollywood could never handle the truth behind the war experience, he once wrote that “the whole-truth war was unfit to shoot. Expurgated war that’s fit to shoot glorified, romanticized, musicalized, propagandized, tomfoolerized, canonized the dead, wounded, paralyzed, insane. Transforming real war to reel war, the film cannibals in every country, aggressor or attacked, stirred their pots and made fairy-tale combat stew.”

Coming home in 1945 with a Bronze Star, a Silver Star, and a Purple Heart, Fuller set out for Hollywood to establish himself as a prolific and independent-minded writer/director/producer. The studios first took notice when Howard Hawks bought the film rights to Fuller’s successful novel The Dark Page (eventually made as Scandal Sheet in 1952, directed by Phil Karlson). But Fuller chose to work with independent producer Robert Lippert in order to retain control of his films. He made three pictures with Lippert, the first being Fuller’s 1949 directorial debut, I Shot Jesse James, which was tagged by the press as the first adult western. “I wanted to do the story of a man who kills another man, especially if he loves him. My story was based on one quote from the Oscar Wilde: Each man kills the thing he loves.”

Fuller honed his cinematic style with Fixed Bayonets in 1951, and with The Steel Helmet earlier that year, which became his first critical and financial success, again bringing him attention from the studios. This time they courted him harder, and it was Twentieth Century-Fox studio head Darryl F. Zanuck to whom Fuller responded. After making Park Row with his own money, he wrote and directed a series of pictures for Zanuck. Pickup on South Street (1953) was Fuller’s first A picture. It won a Bronze Lion at the Venice Film Festival, “ . . . from Commie judges! Zanuck laughed like hell.”

In 1957 he made Run of the Arrow (1957), in which he boldly cast real Native Americans (“It was the first picture where the Indians won.”), as well as Forty Guns (1957), a western which Martin Scorsese claims is “not even a western—it’s pure emotion.” As Fuller explains: “I made the whole movie for just one scene. I was so fed up, in so many westerns, like High Noon, where at the very end of the story the villain gets the girl and holds her in front of him and says to the hero—I dare you to shoot . . . So I said to myself that I would do a story one day where the man shoots the girl. And I did it. That’s why I made that whole movie! And then I had to change it!”

Of his 1961 film Underworld U.S.A., Fuller said, “I had more trouble with that script than with any other script. Because I got all the information, the narcotics figures, the profit figures, gambling figures, prostitution figures, I had them in the script, but I had to take them out . . . The average young fellow, fifteen, seventeen, eighteen, seeing the picture listening to the figures, normally would say—What the hell, why should I work hard? The censors said: You take fifty or a hundred thousand young men and they’ll say, ‘What the heck, if I could make just a hundred thousand that way, it’s good enough for me.’”

Fuller stormed Hollywood, working at a furious pace, writing and directing a remarkable seventeen films from 1949 to 1967, with countless screenplays ready to go. During this period his films also included the western The Baron of Arizona (1950), which Vincent Price always claimed was his favorite film role; the war films Hell and High Water (1954), China Gate(1957), and Merrill’s Marauders (1962); and the thrillers House of Bamboo (1955), The Crimson Kimono (1959), and of course the legendary films Shock Corridor (1963) and The Naked Kiss (1964). Given a small budget and left to his own devices, Fuller worked mostly within the confines of the B picture. His originality and inventiveness helped produce films which, in the fifties and sixties, often surpassed the big-budget, studio-influenced A pictures to which his films were appended in second billing. He was able to be prodigious while still remaining controversial.

In the seventies and eighties, as power in Hollywood began to shift away from filmmakers and toward large multinational corporations, studios demanded more profit and became less permissive. Fuller’s projects gradually fell under the control of almost everybody but him. Producers effectively ruined scripts for projects such as The Klansman (1974) by hiring outside directors not suited for the subject matter to guide Fuller’s screenplays and smooth over the rougher edges of his work. Fuller’s brash indictments and powerful cinematic truths were no longer tolerated. The most famous of these bedeviled films is White Dog, the story of a dog trained to attack Black people, which created a storm of controversy before its release and was eventually shelved by its studio. Rarely seen, the film is in fact an antiracist work. “That was a very bad situation. People began talking and writing about the movie before it was seen, it’s the most antiracist movie I ever made, but Paramount wouldn’t show it in a theater. They didn’t want any problems.”

Fuller, continually misunderstood by Hollywood, moved his family to France for the bulk of the 1980s. According to his wife, Christa Lang Fuller, “He may have hated the French for their role in World War II, but at least they respected his work.” An American legend dedicated to exploring the pathologies of his own country, Fuller was forced into exile.

But he could always count on his small band of fervent supporters. Jean-Luc Godard, for example, cast Fuller in a brief role in his 1965 film Pierrot le fou and dedicated his film Made in U.S.A (1966) to “Nick [Ray] and Samuel [Fuller] who brought me up to respect sound and image.”

It would be some years later, however, before American independents and studios began to acknowledge and celebrate Fuller’s role in the creation of an American independent cinema. If the films Fuller made in the fifties and sixties went relatively unnoticed in their day, the passage of time has seen them grow in stature, thanks to the rise of Cahiers-cum-Sarris-style auteurism and the resurgent cineaste taste for lurid, pulpy noirs.

Elevated to the status of cult figure, Fuller returned to the United States in 1995 to acclaim and celebration. Filmmakers of succeeding generations from around the world, including Wim Wenders, Jim Jarmusch, Aki Kaurismäki, Jonathan Demme, Curtis Hanson, Bernardo Bertolucci, and Martin Scorsese, cite his influence, while references and homages to Fuller’s work appear in films as diverse as Steven Spielberg’s Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984) and Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction (1994). Honored with a Special Distinction Award at the 1996 Independent Spirit Awards, the subject of numerous retrospectives and revivals, cast in films such as Dennis Hopper’s The Last Movie (1971) and Wenders’s The American Friend (1977), and the subject of Kaurismäki’s Tigrero (1994), a film about an unmade Fuller film, Sam Fuller was introduced to an entirely new era of independent filmmakers as well as an audience that was eager to experience his cinematic legacy. Adam Simon’s 1996 documentary on Fuller, The Typewriter, the Rifle and the Movie Camera, eloquently and affectionately tells his story, tracing his ongoing influence on succeeding generations.

Fuller enjoyed his role as elder statesman of independent filmmaking and film art. Peter Bogdanovich, for whom Fuller did an uncredited rewrite of his debut feature Targets (1968), has ranked Fuller, along with John Cassavetes and Jean Renoir, among the most gracious and generous filmmakers in history. The stories of his assistance to others are countless; the impersonations of his gruff voice and cigar-chomping style, loving and vivid.

Fuller died on October 30, 1997, in Hollywood. He is survived by his wife, actress and writer Christa Lang Fuller, his daughter Samantha and granddaughter Samira. His iconoclastic spirit remains to inspire generations of filmmakers and filmgoers to whom he spoke.

A version of this article was originally published in the Fall 1998 issue of Scenario: The Magazine of Screenwriting Art.

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