The Films of Samuel Fuller. Lisa Dombrowski
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and emotionally, rather than offering a clear political position.
Fuller’s storytelling goal is to arouse emotion, and his screenplays combine hard-boiled characters, ironic contradictions, excessive conflict, and a selective embrace of classical and generic conventions in order to shake the viewer up. Fuller called his characters “gutter people,” outcasts who lived by their own code in a shadowy world he found more inherently dramatic than that occupied by clean-cut, well-behaved Americans.23 In their own lingo, they are “retreads,” “doggies,” “cannons,” “grifters,” “wetnoses,” “ichibons,” and “bon bons.” Typically criminals (I Shot Jesse James, The Baron of Arizona, Pickup on South Street, Underworld, U.S.A., The Naked Kiss, Shark!, Thieves After Dark), misfits (The Steel Helmet, Fixed Bayonets, Hell and High Water, Run of the Arrow, The Big Red One, Street of No Return), or obsessives (Park Row, Forty Guns, Shock Corridor, White Dog), Fuller’s protagonists lie, cheat, steal, betray, or kill in order to achieve their desires. For them, the ultimate triumph is merely survival. While Fuller draws from stock “underworld” types—thieves, prostitutes, cops, and reporters—he uses them to reveal the bitter ironies of life. He shows us an American footsoldier shooting a POW, a pickpocket laughing at patriotism, politicians in bed with criminals, children learning to become terrorists—the veneer of polite society and civilization stripped away to expose the shocking truth.
Fuller’s narratives place his protagonists in extreme situations fraught with conflict and contradiction in order to produce “emotional violence.” Fuller’s favorite example of an emotionally violent film was David Lean’s Brief Encounter (1945), a bittersweet romance about two people who fall in love but are married to others:
Now when you have a married man and a married woman, they’re gonna cheat. They’re all scared, scared, scared. But these two won’t even touch hands on a bed; they’ve never kissed. The guilt! They’re guilty, and they haven’t done a damn thing—but in a way they have. And the violence is against themselves. That’s better than any barroom stuff.24
At first, this may seem a strange example for Fuller to embrace, given the vast tonal and stylistic differences between his pictures and the comparatively restrained Brief Encounter. Yet what Fuller responds to in this film is the inner conflict of the two protagonists: they want to respect their marriages, but they also want each other. Fuller equates emotional violence with the severe psychological turmoil that results from an individual having two opposing desires that cannot both be satisfactorily fulfilled. This is the sort of narrative situation that most frequently confronts his protagonists, from I Shot Jesse James’s John Ford, who believes he has to kill his friend in order to marry his girl, to The Naked Kiss’s Kathy, who desperately wants to marry the town millionaire and lead a clean life but discovers that the millionaire is a sexual predator and clean living is dirtier than she thought. Fuller’s embrace of paradox often results in irony, a bitter recognition of truth’s complexity.
Fuller’s interest in creating intensified narrative situations in his screenplays often overrides the powerful influence of classical conventions. Classical Hollywood narratives tend to feature tightly woven chains of cause and effect; each scene leads directly into the next, with no additional scenes that are extraneous to the dominant narrative action.25 These norms help to ensure consistency, coherence, and verisimilitude within screenplays—qualities Fuller was often willing to sacrifice in order to achieve heightened conflict. Fuller’s original scripts sport looser, more episodic structures designed to contrast the rhythms and tones of scenes and to unsettle audience assumptions. Action may arise quickly—and with little apparent motivation—and be followed by another unexpected event. The narratives of some of his movies, such as Park Row, Forty Guns, Shock Corridor, Dead Pigeon on Beethoven Street, The Big Red One, and Street of No Return, even appear overstuffed, as if Fuller thought of too many great plot points and simply decided to keep them all. Sharply contrasting action, sudden shifts in tone, surprising plot developments, and multiple lines of conflict all contribute to creating intensified narrative situations in Fuller’s films, even as they often undercut viewer expectations of clear causal links, consistent character psychology, and careful plot motivation. It is telling that film trade publications described the vast majority of Fuller’s pre-1970s pictures as melodramas, applying a longstanding definition that associated the term with thrilling, action-packed stories.26 This trend is a potent reminder that Fuller’s work is a variant of a cinematic tradition that extends back to the serials of the silent era, in which coincidental, implausible, and often confusing narratives function to create heightened emotion and sensationalism.27
While reference to genre conventions helps to motivate many of Fuller’s narratives, his films just as often challenge our generic expectations. With a few exceptions, Fuller’s movies participate in the war, crime, and western genres—standard territory for low-budget action films.28 Genre films contain highly conventionalized protagonists, settings, situations, themes, and iconography; while variations on each element occur, their repetition over the course of a genre’s development shapes viewer expectations regarding what is “appropriate” for the genre. Although Fuller’s genre films often employ conventional character types and situations, they tend to twist some genre elements and completely ignore others, even while relying on genre to motivate unexplained action. Rather than using genre to explore a defined cultural conflict—in the western, for example, the way of the gun vs. the rule of law—Fuller selectively invokes generic elements in his films as a foundation for his own narrative interests. Fuller’s preferences for brutish characters and heightened conflict lend themselves easily to some genres, such as crime and war; his westerns and social problem pictures, however, are less conventional and often contain narrative structures and plot elements not usually found within the given genre. After Fuller started his own production company in the late 1950s, his use of excessive sex and violence further warped his genre narratives, and several of his subsequent films are primarily structured around sensational set pieces (Shock Corridor, The Naked Kiss, White Dog, and Street of No Return). Genre conventions thus provide a convenient structure on which Fuller can build his own ideas; some structures are strengthened by his fresh approach, while others buckle under the weight of his distinct worldview.
Fuller’s preproduction drawing of the character Short Round from The Steel Helmet. Chrisam Films, Inc.
Fuller’s writing process enabled him to visualize the development of his screenplays and to orchestrate narrative elements for maximum emotional impact. His scriptwriting involved copious research and detailed planning. An early profile of Fuller written at the beginning of his tenure at Twentieth Century–Fox describes how he initially developed a story by drawing pictures of characters, locations, and key action before sitting down at a typewriter.29 Later interviews suggest this process could also be contemporaneous with the actual writing of the screenplay but confirm Fuller’s tendency to cast actors according to his character sketches. He also produced drawings of sets that functioned as blueprints for the art department and drafted upwards of seventy-five drawings detailing how scenes should be shot.30 Fuller’s penchant for visualizing his stories as he was writing them harkens back to his years in journalism, when he often picked up extra cash from drawing cartoons; more significant, however, is how this process underscores his tendency to think in pictures, to imagine how a story can be told through visually arresting images.
When working on several scripts at a time, Fuller also used a system that enabled him to keep track of the narrative structure of each project on a blackboard. The blackboard for each script contained a chart of the film’s plot, with white chalk indicating exposition, yellow chalk for the introduction of a character, blue chalk for romantic scenes, and red chalk for action and violence.31
If I can end the first act with one or two red lines, the second act with two or three red lines, and the third act with four or five red lines, I am going uphill. So I can get a pretty good idea of the balance of the violence and of the romance or anything I want on that board.32
While Fuller admits he did not use the blackboard