The Films of Samuel Fuller. Lisa Dombrowski
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the press right as his career stalled in the mid-1960s and has been perpetuated widely ever since. The first in-depth profile of Fuller, a 1965 New York Times Magazine piece titled “Low Budget Movies with POW!” describes his typical film as being shot in ten days on $200,000. Fuller himself is portrayed as a “filmic fireball,” “dedicated to depicting, at rather small cost and in vivid visual terms, the abnormalities of the world around him.”11 This article cemented Fuller’s reputation in the American press as an outsider filmmaker who voluntarily embraced the world of B movies in order to work in opposition to mainstream Hollywood. By the time British and American auteur critics discovered Fuller in the 1960s—as French critics had a decade before—the terms by which his career would be discussed were already in place: he was the primary author of his films, his movies had low budgets, and he worked independent of the grip of Hollywood’s commercial talons.12 These characteristics positioned Fuller as “a role model for maverick filmmakers,” a romantic example of what personal vision and self-sacrifice could achieve.13 The difficulties Fuller faced in getting projects off the ground in his later years only further solidified his outsider persona.
As with the description of Fuller’s work as primitive, his status as a B-movie maverick contains some elements of truth: he often shot on a low budget, and he did have primary creative control over many of his films. Nevertheless, in order to romanticize Fuller’s outsider status, this portrait overlooks the varied production conditions under which he worked and downplays his frequent reliance on Hollywood studios even when he was an independent producer. Throughout his career, Fuller championed the distinctiveness of the auteur voice and struggled to direct his own scripts his own way. In this sense, he was a maverick. But he also recognized that some of the best production circumstances he enjoyed in his five-decade-long career occurred not when he was an independent but while he was working in the studio system.
The dominant aspects of Fuller’s biographical legend have only brought us so far. His years as a journalist, a footsoldier, and a struggling director provide us with a lens through which to view his work, but it is hardly an exhaustive lens. Biography limits us to considering how his life impacted his movies while neglecting other forces that influenced his aesthetic, such as classical norms, industrial trends, and market conditions. The focus on Fuller’s willingness to break classical realist conventions in the criticism of those who describe him as a primitive offers a useful contribution to the study of his films; however, the short articles that dominate this critical strain never explore in a systematic fashion how Fuller’s aesthetic manifests itself through narrative and stylistic choices in individual pictures. Finally, when critics describe Fuller as an independent maverick, their tendency is to portray the studios and their executives as villainous watchdogs who inhibit his creative freedom. This simplistic approach to industry relations fails to consider the variety of needs that bind directors to studios and distributors, as well as the ways these relationships can enable as much as constrain the creativity of directors.
Considering Fuller’s work as a reflection of competing influences enables us to understand more fully the complexities of his films and his evolving strategies as a director. As his career progresses, classical and genre norms, production circumstances, censorship, and industrial conditions shape Fuller’s films to varying degrees, resulting in a body of work that utilizes a range of techniques to express defined artistic interests. Exploring Fuller’s aesthetic vision in the context of his contemporary industrial conditions highlights the most significant aspects of his biographical legend while qualifying and contextualizing longstanding assumptions about his career. A survey of the relationship between Fuller’s narrative and stylistic goals and his working methods further clarifies how he attempted to translate his particular worldview onto the screen.
Fuller as Storyteller
Fuller passionately believed “the story is God,”14 and he fought to film his yarns with minimum interference his entire career. His status as a screenwriter enabled him not only to shoot his own scripts but also to rewrite the work of others, offering him a higher degree of control during preproduction than that enjoyed by many directors of his midlevel stature. Fuller’s screenplays reveal a unique authorial sensibility, one that combines an interest in history and realism with a desire to entertain in an often sensational fashion. In a 1992 self-penned article, “Film Fiction: More Factual Than Facts,” Fuller offers an analysis of the Mervyn LeRoy film I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang (1932) to illustrate how the fictional presentation of an event can appear more “true” than reality: “The more we are Muni [Paul Muni, the actor playing the protagonist], the more the fiction of brutality in the movie becomes factual. Why? Because we are hit with hammer-blows of emotion.”15 These “hammer-blows of emotion” are what Fuller sought to create in his films, crafting his scripts to convey a hard-hitting form of truth through scenes that shock and startle the viewer. This storytelling strategy took hold in Fuller during his career in journalism, was manifested in his films through their narrative content and structure, and was shaped by his screenwriting process.
Fuller himself has confirmed—as several critics suggest—that the tabloid aesthetic and “illustrated lectures” featured in his films are rooted in his years spent in the newspaper business.16 Although Fuller began hawking newspapers on sidewalks in junior high and worked in journalism through the 1930s, his stint as a young crime reporter at the New York Evening Graphic arguably had the greatest impact on his brand of storytelling. A cross between the New York Post and the National Enquirer, the Graphic mixed an impassioned defense of the common man with tawdry stories of sex and violence. There, Fuller learned the art of “creative exaggeration” and the power of a compelling lead, two storytelling techniques that characterize his self-written films.17 As a journalist on the crime beat, Fuller witnessed and then wrote about murderers’ confessions, suicides, executions, and race riots. “Every newspaperman has such a Hellbox to draw from,” he later wrote. “Every newspaperman is a potential filmmaker. All he or she has to do is transfer real emotion to reel emotion and sprinkle with imagination.”18 Fuller’s journalistic career thus provided him not only with strong copy that he could transform into screenplays, but also with an approach to storytelling that de-emphasized exposition and analysis in favor of blunt “truth” and bold-faced, revelatory thrills.
Samuel Fuller in his office while working on Park Row, flanked by statues of Charles Guttenberg (left) and Benjamin Franklin (right) that appear in the film. Ever the newspaperman, Fuller wears a reporter’s visor. Chrisam Films, Inc.
The desire to stretch beyond fact-based reporting led Fuller to begin writing novels and screenplays, yet he retained a tabloid approach to truth-telling throughout his career. His first books published in the 1930s—Burn, Baby, Burn!, the story of a pregnant woman on death row; Test Tube Baby, on artificial insemination; and Make Up and Kiss, an exposé of the cosmetics industry—reveal the topicality and dark humor that infuse the more outrageous of Fuller’s later films. When he began writing screenplays, his goal was “to use the screen as a newspaper.”19 His interest lay in “truthful revelation,” in dramatizing “anything that’s informative and always entertaining.”20 Most significantly, he believed film to be an unrivaled medium in its ability to educate as well as entertain:
One day the greatest educational medium will be the film. Millions of children will watch a moment in history told through drama so gripping that dates of events will become dates of exciting moments, instead of numbers to crowd their reluctant minds…. There is no art medium that can accomplish this and reach as many people as the art of film.21
Such quotes have led some critics to suggest that Fuller’s scripts reveal a definite ideological agenda.22 To be sure, Fuller does not balk at revealing the failings of American society, and his films repeatedly engage race and gender in a frank and uncompromising manner rare for their times. Yet Fuller’s contradictory narratives defy coherent political analysis, leading him to be described in the press as everything from a liberal to a fascist to an anarchist. While he may intend to educate, the “creative