New on DVD: The Samuel Fuller Collection
Sam Fuller is Hollywood’s great tabloid director, a former newspaperman, pulp novelist and soldier who worked his way up from screenwriting to directing films, sometimes for the studios and sometimes independently, and brought all of his experiences and attitudes to his filmmaking. Only two of the films in The Samuel Fuller Collection (The Collector’s Choice) (Sony), co-produced by The Film Foundation (a project guided in part by Martin Scorsese), are actually directed by Fuller. The rest are either written by him or based on his novels and are of decidedly uneven quality. It Happened In Hollywood (1937), Fuller’s first script, is an indifferent B-movie about a stalwart silent film cowboy hero (Richard Dix) lost in the transition to sound. The simple (you might say simplistic) story plays out with none of Fuller’s attitude and is defined largely by Dix’s laconic warmth and stolid presence. Power of the Press (1943) is a newspaper drama based on a Fuller story with a lazily-directed murder mystery and breaks for wartime propaganda, and Adventure in the Sahara (1938) is a basic Foreign Legion B-picture adventure from a Fuller story.
Underworld U.S.A.
Fuller had just become a director in his own right the same year that Shockproof (1949), a studio crime melodrama directed by Douglas Sirk, was released. Cornel Wilde, never the most expressive of leading men, is a cynical parole officer who falls for ex-con Patricia Knight and throws his future and hers away to run off. This handsome lovers-on-the-run thriller is a minor noir with Fuller’s tabloid sensibility and Sirk’s romantic gloss, directed with an economy that makes the most of its modest budget. What Sirk brings is a romanticism that softens the shadows of the noir atmosphere. More classically Fuller is the newspaper murder mystery Scandal Sheet (1952), a low-budget spin on The Big Clock based on the Fuller novel The Dark Page and directed by Phil Karlson with a suitably sleazy atmosphere of journalistic cynicism. John Derek is perfectly cast as a callow reporter who doesn’t blanch at anything to get a story and Broderick Crawford as his editor who kills an “old maid” and is torn between covering up a murder and encouraging his star reporter to play up the story of “the Lonelyhearts Murder” into a tabloid sensation: just the kind of contradiction that Fuller can embrace.
