The Films of Samuel Fuller. Lisa Dombrowski
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careful plotting of scripts in order to develop contrasting emotion and accelerating action. As Fuller’s screenwriting process favored heightening dramatic conflict and varying the tones of scenes over producing a tight, three-act, causal narrative, it is little wonder that the norms of verisimilitude, clarity, and coherence embraced by classical Hollywood filmmaking are not always apparent in his movies.
Samuel Fuller considered himself first and foremost a storyteller, and the way he told stories on film reflected how his narrative preferences were filtered through cinematic conventions and industrial pressures. While his early scripts produced by Lippert and Twentieth Century–Fox reveal closer adherence to classical and generic norms, Fuller’s move into independent moviemaking in the late 1950s enabled him to film scripts that had previously been rejected as too unconventional. In the process of establishing his identity as an independent and targeting an adult audience, Fuller’s stories became increasingly sensational, topical, and sometimes less than tasteful. Throughout his career, his narratives put to work the lessons he learned from his years in journalism and demonstrate a willingness to flaunt custom and propriety in order to create challenging, startling viewing experiences. At their best, his narratives are exercises in arousal, a surprising blend of brutality, humor, and pathos. The shocking thrills contained in Fuller’s scripts are amplified onscreen by his production methods. A review of his visual style provides a helpful introduction to the strategies he used to bring his punchy yarns to two-fisted life.
Movement and Conflict
During the studio era, Hollywood operated according to a mode of production that encouraged speed, efficiency, and original approaches to classical conventions. Fuller’s early track record of shooting fast, spending little, and delivering genre hits made him an attractive find for Darryl Zanuck and the other studio executives who courted him in the early 1950s, but Fuller never fully embraced the “invisible” style of directors like George Cukor and Howard Hawks that dominated Hollywood in the studio era. According to the Fuller legend, the characteristics that constitute classicism—balance, order, and unity—should not even be included in a sentence bearing the name of Samuel Fuller. While Fuller’s films do frequently appear unbalanced, incongruous, and disunified, they are not so all of the time. In fact, Fuller was entirely capable of adhering to classical norms, and many of his films, particularly those produced by Twentieth Century–Fox, contain scenes that are models of conventional staging and editing. Any argument concerning Fuller’s visual style must acknowledge the complete range of its expression, taking into account both the traditional and the weird, what worked within the studio system and what changed without.
Although Fuller’s films may often appear haphazard or unstructured, their visual style is less the result of negligence, instinct, or limited production resources than of a number of conscious strategies designed to maximize the visceral impact of the viewing experience. Fuller’s work is shaped by his tendency to shoot long takes as the primary foundation of scenes; to juxtapose long-take scenes with those reliant on montage; and to develop kineticism, sharp contrasts in tone and style, rhythmic and graphic editing patterns, and stylistic “weirdness.” Fuller’s dominant stylistic strategies complement and support each other, distinguishing his films from those made by directors who worked with similar resources in like genres. While not all of these characteristics are contained within every Fuller film, and they are manifested through different techniques in different films, even the most classically constructed of Fuller’s pictures contain at least two of these general strategies. In conjunction with the narrative, these tactics are designed to startle the audience and produce the “hammer-blows of emotion” that Fuller so desired.
Few production and postproduction records survive for Fuller’s films, yet interviews with him and his crew members, as well as the films themselves, provide some indication of how Fuller’s working methods contributed to the creation of visceral effects. While his production periods were often quite short, Fuller made time for rehearsal before shooting even on his low-budget pictures, suggesting that the intense planning he put into preproduction carried over onto the set.33 What most distinguished Fuller’s approach to filmmaking were his ideas concerning how a scene should be shot. Classical Hollywood filmmaking typically strives to maintain continuity in space, time, and action in an effort to communicate the narrative clearly and efficiently. A conventional scene might begin with a wide master shot to establish the space, then cut in to a medium shot or two-shot that isolates significant action, then subsequently cut into close-ups or shot–reverse shot patterns that highlight character reactions and emotions, and finally cut back out to a medium or wide shot to re-establish the space as a new line of narrative action is initiated. This type of editing pattern, often described as analytical editing, presents the totality of the space and then breaks it into parts, firmly directing the viewer’s gaze to ensure clear and efficient exposition of the narrative.34 In order to provide coverage for a scene—or enough camera angles and compositions for editors to choose from—a director customarily films the complete scene once in the establishing master shot, then shoots sections of the scene again from closer angles and shot scales. While Fuller embraced the concept of a master shot, the general lack of analytical editing and coverage in most of his films, particularly those made outside of Twentieth Century–Fox, suggests that for him, the master shot functions less as an opportunity to establish the space than as the very foundation of the scene. Rather than acting as a jumping-off point for shot–reverse shot or point-of-view shot patterns, the master often becomes the dominant shot for scenes in Fuller’s films, intercut with only a few quick close-ups or cutaways.
Fuller’s tendency to favor the master shot was rooted less in a desire for economy than in a desire to exploit the tension produced by the technical requirements of a long take. “I don’t like to shoot a scene from a close angle, medium, long shot, and then take it into the editor and see if we can do anything with it,” he said. “I want to see the excitement on the set, while we’re shooting.”35 Joseph Biroc, Fuller’s director of photography on Run of the Arrow, China Gate, Forty Guns, and Verboten! also pointed out that by forcing the actors to perform a scene in one extended take, Fuller was able to capitalize on their nervous energy, as well as on unexpected reactions or bits of business. “Sam felt—and he was right—that the longer you make the shot, the better the people can act it out, the more real it all seems, instead of making it in small pieces—cut, cut, cut, the way it is usually done.”36 As the master-shot long take requires cast and crew to focus their attention and be “in” the scene for a longer period of time, it increases the potential for unexpected interactions between actors that might speak to the narrative within the scene.
Fuller laid extraordinarily long tracks during the production of Forty Guns—the length of Twentieth Century–Fox’s back lot—in order to film the characters of Griff, Wes, and Chico walking down Main Street in one continuous shot. Extended tracking during master-shot long takes is part of Fuller’s stylistic signature. Chrisam Films, Inc.
When combined with his tendency to shoot only one or two takes for each shot, Fuller’s preference for the master-shot long take often resulted in a lack of coverage for scenes that troubled his editors and challenged their ability to “fix” continuity breaks. Yet these “mistakes” appear to have concerned Fuller little, as they often contribute to his preferred stylistic strategies. Gene Fowler, Jr., Fuller’s editor on Run of the Arrow, China Gate, and Forty Guns, explained:
Sam is a guy who shoots very long scenes, no cuts, and usually shoots just one take. So if anything turned out to be wrong with the take you were screwed.… If an actor would flub a line in the middle of a take it presented quite a problem for me because you had nothing to cut away to.37
An advantage to shooting a scene from multiple angles and shot scales is that adequate coverage enables the editor to use a different shot of the same action if there is a problem with dialogue, acting, lighting, sound, cinematography, etc. However, if no other shot of the action exists, the editor must either leave the error in the shot or create an unconventional way to mask the error. Fowler and Fuller’s other editors thus frequently resorted to cutaways to contiguous but irrelevant