To mark the release of The Samuel Fuller Collection (The Collector’s Choice) (Sony), I reprint an essay I wrote for NWFF’s Samuel Fuller film series many years ago.

Sam Fuller and ever-present cigar

Samuel Fuller straddled two generations: he was the last of that breed of old Hollywood tough guy directors and, along with Orson Welles, one of the first independent mavericks like Howard Hawks and Raoul Walsh and William Wellman he came from a career outside of the cinema and the arts, spending his formative years working his way up the journalism ladder from hawking papers on the street to running copy to become one of the youngest crime reporters in the US (according to him). During the depression he tramped the country and then turned back to writing, eventually publishing a handful of pulp novels and landing work writing scripts in Hollywood. Soon after the bombing of Pearl Harbor he enlisted in the army, earning the Bronze Star in Italy, the Silver Star in Normandy, and the Purple Heart as member of the First Infantry Division, better known as the Big Red One (immortalized in his autobiographical 1975 film).

Fuller had lived a rough, active life before he directed his first film, I Shot Jesse James in 1949, and he brought that life into his films. Fuller’s heroes are everything from social outcasts to psychopaths, but almost all outsiders to the American dream, marginalized figures on the fringes of society. Soldiers, cops, pickpockets, prostitutes, two-bit hoods, gunmen and con men, his heroes are more ruthless than his villains because that’s what it takes two survive in this violent world. While other directors who came out of World War II made films that intently explored the grim face of battle, Fuller’s war movies were about madness and meaninglessness.

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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.

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The Steel Helmet is Samuel Fuller’s third film as a director and his first masterpiece and it remains one of the greatest war movies ever made. I write about the film and its history for Turner Classic Movies online.

Gene Evans as Sgt. Zack

Shot in ten days, with only a couple of days of exteriors and the rest on studio backlots and sets, on a budget of just over $100,000, The Steel Helmet isn’t a paean to surface realism. Battle scenes were filled out with only 25 extras, students from UCLA who doubled as both American and Korean soldiers, and Griffith Park stood in for the Korean jungles. But what Fuller lost to budgetary restrictions he gained in the freedom to portray the experience of men in war. Where other directors who came out of World War II made films that intently explored the grim face of battle, Fuller’s war movies were about madness and meaninglessness, and that theme began here.

The film opens on a close-up of a banged-up infantry helmet, which rises to reveal a grim, grimy American soldier, staring out from under it with almost dead-eyed desperation. The soldier, his arms bound behind him, his leg wounded, writhes through the corpses of a massacre until he freezes as another approaches. All we see are bare feet, peasant pants and a dangling rifle. Is it friend or foe? That question hangs over almost every incident of the film as the soldier, gruff World War II retread Sgt. Zack (Gene Evans, an unknown in his first starring role), tries to make his way back to the American lines, with a Korean orphan tagging along like a puppy (Zack nicknames him Short Round, “because you’re not going all the way”; Spielberg borrowed the name for the cute tagalong kid in the second “Indiana Jones” film) and ragtag platoon lost behind enemy lines. …

“This story is dedicated to the United States Infantry,” reads the onscreen legend at the opening of the film. It ends with a far less comforting thought. In place of the traditional “The End,” Fuller leaves the audience with “There is no end to this story.” In between, Fuller confronts the internment of Japanese Americans in World War II (it was the first American film to address the issue in any form) and the Jim Crow laws in the South, explores racism within the ranks of the American army and shows an American soldier shoot an unarmed prisoner in a blast of pure rage.

Read the entire feature on TCM here. The film plays on Turner Classic Movies on Friday, January 3 and is available on DVD in the the Eclipse box set The First Films of Samuel Fuller.

[Originally published as part of the “MSN Cadillac” series.]

Saving Private Ryan has the budget and the production values, but if you want a World War II story from a real vet’s perspective, Sam Fuller is still the man and The Big Red One, drawn from his own war experiences, is the film.

Robert Carradine (standing in for the cigar-chomping, pulp-fiction-writing Fuller), Mark Hamill, Bobby Di Cicco and Kelly Ward are the green recruits who become hardened survivors under the gruff tutelage of Lee Marvin’s tough, taciturn Sergeant. We never learn his name — this World War I retread is simply Sarge, and Sarge teaches these raw recruits that in war you don’t murder, you kill. The only glory in war is surviving, in Fuller’s clear-eyed portrait of combat, and this quartet of survivors becomes Sarge’s “Four Horsemen,” the eternal figures in a rifle squad filled out by a couple hundred replacements whose names they finally give up trying to learn.

Lee Marvin is Sarge

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