The Language Terrorist:

Samuel Fuller and the human flavor of emotion.

by Francesco Paolo Di Salvia

I'm going to watch this movie [Verboten!] again because Im

always full of admiration and jealousy after having watched a
film by Samuel Fuller, because I like to receive lessons in
cinema. (Franois Truffaut, 1960)

In May of 1940, Sir Winston Churchill thunders from the benches in the House of
Commons: "I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, sweat and tears". Those were
really hard times for the land of Shakespeare and Hitchcock. Hitler was at the gates
and the hellish "Operation Sea Lion" was about to pour tons of heavy metal on
London and surroundings. In those years, the promising crime reporter Samuel Fuller
is serving at front for the 1st Infantry Division of the United States. He has a flashy
red patch sewn on his camouflage. Its The Big Red One. During those hard days at
front, the young Sam fully understands the meaning of blood, sweat and tears. This
enormous load of empirical knowledge, - summed up with the journalism experience
that earned him the label of filmmaker-reporter has contributed to develop in the
man-Fuller the idea of some inner wilderness of the human condition. That idea is
indelibly mirrored in the filmmaker-Fuller.

One hundred years after the birth of Samuel Fuller, and almost fifteen years since
his death, we are dealing with the issue of handing down his name to posterity. The
name of Sam Fuller keeps buzzing in the air like a blessing on the Nouvelle Vague,
the New German Cinema and the New Hollywood. He is recognized as an inspiring
teacher for all the new generations of filmmakers. Nonetheless, his legacy is never
shared with that of the other Great American Directors. Mainly in Italy, but not only,
it remains a treasure for insiders. This is mainly because his movies have been too
often confused, in the collective memory, with general b-movies and commercial war
movies.

Samuel Fuller was born in Worcester, a small town in Massachusetts, in 1912. In

1929, he moves to New York, seeking fortune as a newsboy. The young Sam is more
prone to write for newspapers than to just waving them under the noses of passers-by.
He starts as a proof-reader. Then, when he is still seventeen, he becomes the youngest
reporter in the "The New York Journal"s history The old-fashioned reporter's life
leads him to wander across America in search of stories. He wanders throughout the
South of the country during the Great Depression and the New Deal years. One day,
in San Francisco, he decides to start writing stories. The first screenplay is dated
1939; but his first movie was shot only in 1948. In the midst, the war and the service
for the Big Red One - the 1st Infantry Division - which leads him to fight on all the
most famous first lines of World War II, including Normandy, Sicily and Africa. In
1965 he marries the actress Christa Lang, who was introduced to him by Godard,
1
during the filming of "Pierrot le Fou". The marriage will soften the fighter for the rest
of his life. In 1997, oldness stabs Fuller in the back. Its October the 30th. The most
radical filmmaker in Hollywood goes to sleep forever. He leaves behind a legacy
consisting of films, screenplays, novels and even some performances as an actor.

In the work of Fuller, war has a key role. Fuller peaks in the genre are generally
considered "The Steel Helmet", "Merrills Marauders" and "The Big Red One".
Battle has got the connotation of a metaphysical place in which the main characters
move sociologically and perform their actions. The public see their baseness in
connection with the devastation around, so people could understand it, but absolutely
never justify it. The war in Fuller has the physicality of the "Wild Strawberries" by
Bergman, neither more nor less. The role of death and complementarily - the role of
survival are the middle of his research. These concepts become something alien from
survivors. Life and death concerns the bodies, and only them. Survival is beyond
death; but one couldnt exist without the other. The survivors existence is merely
physical and material at this point. The psychic and moral side of every unharmed
soldier is riddled by bullets and left to rot on the battlefield along with their dead
comrades. The concept gains significance noticing how little Fuller indulges on death
- the actual one. He only notifies its presence with the camera, before dealing again
with the living soldiers and the pathetic nature of their gestures. Moreover, war can
be understood only by those who fought it. There is an infamous scene in which
Sergeant Zack ("The Steel Helmet") kills a prisoner and then he justifies himself by
saying "I dont believe in the Geneva Convention". This scene is another evidence of
how the public cant accept in a movie whats just customary on the actual battlefield.

Violence is treated by Fuller as an integral part of American society. A form of

expression amongst the most lively in American folklore. Fuller makes it collide
against the typical false respectability of the Fifties. The way he deals with war fever,
communism and fascism, during the Cold War era, attracted many enemies to
himself. You cant say, obviously, that the cinema of Fuller fully applied the anti-
McChartyist lesson by Ray Bradbury; but his movies are neither fascist nor
propaganda, as often - especially in Italy they were curtly labeled. Caprara writes
about him: "Every political twisting goes off screen in the cinema according to
Fuller". The director himself says about "The Steel Helmet": "The Communists were
treating me like I was a Fascist; the Fascists like I was a Communist. All that helped
the movie". His anti-communism is mannerist. Its based on his hate for
totalitarianism and his love for individual freedom. Fuller is a free-thinker. He
addresses his most severe criticisms to the military apparatus and the way it turns
men into simple gears in an attack/defense system, while spoiling them of each of
their moral and judgmental virtues. Tavernier once wrote: "We can say that Fuller is
one of those American Democrats, generous and idealistic, who has - as a little extra
quality - some cynicism and an anarchic spirit". His films often turn into thundering
attacks about what he hates the most (racism, bigotry, love for violence). A way of
describing reality that doesnt start from a static point of view. Its immediate and
2
objective. Tavernier continues: "This author is a realist only when writing the subject.
Besides that, in dialogue or image, he is a visionary, a poet".

Perhaps his hurry was the biggest issue for the intellectual reputation of Fuller.
Caprara says: "Fuller is a storytelling director". Fuller doesnt seem to care about
refining characters and environments. Sometimes they look like sketches. Fuller
devotes himself to an extreme narrative urge. His need to tell. On the contrary, Fuller
has got something lacking in a master like Antonioni: the sense of immediacy and
practicalness. Antonioni is obsessed by plot, perfection of characters and
environments, but its all faded in a slow and cryptic timing; while Fuller exasperates
love for pragmatism and for hitting "where it hurts the most". "Samuel Fuller is a
primitive. His imbalance is not rudimentary. Its rude. His films are not simplistic.
They are simple". Opinion of Truffaut. He goes on: "Its impossible to say about one
of Fullers movies: it was needed to be done otherwise; it was needed to be faster; it
was needed this way or that way. Things are what they are and they are filmed
exactly as they should be filmed. Its immediate cinema. Irreproachable. Blameless.
Samuel Fuller doesnt give himself time to think. Its obvious that hes happy only
when he is shooting".

His cinematic style is masculine, but not macho, and never sexist. The male hero
slides into an abject or violent adventure. He walks amongst characters like him,
ignored and cursed people, dealing with crises, crime, revenge and defeat. Women
are often right. Women know how to generate feelings (except in "Park Row") and
they work like guardians of mens moral survival. Fuller's work must be seen from
above. Its pointless to wander from film to film. The result is quite varied, but the
general sense of his work is unique and original.

In addition to his war movies, Fuller has also created several films focused on the
work of reporters. In my opinion, here lies his masterpiece: " Shock Corridor". The
movies anticipatory power is comparable to that of Billy Wilder's "The Ace in the
Hole. It tells the story of a reporter, Johnny Barrett, who wants to win the Pulitzer
Prize, so he decides to be confined in a mental hospital, in which a murder was
committed. He will able to unmask the murder; but the rational and mental effort to
solve the riddle will make his own neuroses blow. So he will stay in the hospital as a
patient. Dazed and with no expression on his face. An example of social cinema with
no shame or false decency. Its all shown with a faster-paced style than Hitchcock,
and its often even more significant, like in the oneiric sequences, touching a sort of
dreamlike expressionism. The metaphor about the cyclical nature of history -
another of Fullers themes - is ruthless: director shows the newshound being punished
for his audacity with internment in the same place that he himself had chosen to reach
eternal glory. Hubris and tisis like in Greek tragedies. Arrogance and divine
punishment. According to Sam, "God is Nature", as he says to Jim Jarmush in the
documentary "Tigrero" by Mika Kaurismaki. Fuller can be considered one of few real
tragedians in Hollywood.
3
 But each and every film has something memorable in it. About "Verboten!", we
should mention the relentless shot/countershot between Fullers original footage and
archive footage showing Nazi crimes; about "White Dog", the ability to create a new
kind of suspense, mocking the audience credulity, promising an emotion (the
unattended African-American kid as we see the racist dog on the loose a few steps
away), but giving a different one in the end (the mother withdraws the kid before the
dog turns the corner and then the animal kills an ordinary man), all supported by the
thrilling soundtrack by Ennio Morricone; about "Underworld USA", the cynical
courage to say that crime often " pays"; and it pays well, too.

Fuller is also a forerunner in inserting latent homosexuality in typically manly

movies, - one for all: the western "I Shot Jesse James", in rejecting critics awards, in
mixing individual and systemic neuroses, likewise the following generations of
independent filmmakers, from the early Scorsese and Coppola, to the contemporary
Jarmusch and Tarantino.

In conclusion, we could deduce that war can be described, without mystifying it,
only by those who still bear bandages all around the body for war wounds. Im
thinking about neo-realist movies, in Italy, and, in modern times, about the visions of
Kusturica, Ioseliani and the one-timer Denis Tanovic. Not surprisingly, in these war
movies, - or better: movies on war, - we dont see a lot of wasted blood and shots,
just like in the films of Fuller. An opposite direction than the one taken by the last
Steven Spielberg (despite the John Miller/Tom Hanks character in "Saving Private
Ryan" is an homage to Frank Merrill from "Merrills Marauders"; his depiction of D-
Day seems to subvert Fuller's precept about the relationship between fiction and
modern infantry battles; but the audience was educated by splatter movies
meanwhile), Ridley Scott and many other manly, badass, propaganda films we had
seen in the recent years. Despite American presidents throwing themselves against
alien spaceships, cinema is always and mainly emotion.

4
Sams precepts.
Cinema is like a battlefield... Love, hate, action, violence, death. In one word:
emotion!.

"Every movie with fighting soldiers is a another goddamn recruiting film".

In war, there are no heroes. Only survivors.

Its not possible for cinema to catch the genuine horror of a modern infantry battle:
audience could never emotionally stand a slaughterhouse of those proportions.

I hate hunting. I hate the hypocrisy of this so-called sport. Ive never understood the
way they hang trophies to the walls. And what is war if not the most degrading form
of hunting?.

I believe there is nothing more glorious than peace. War has got nothing glorious.
War is tragic. I believe that every person who fought a war doesnt want to start
another one. My movies are honestly anti-war. I dont glorify war. I show that is
something barbaric and medieval.

Theres no need for characters or camera to move. Whats important is that

audience is shaken. I call it emotion-cinema.

Selected filmography.
1948 I Shot Jesse James; 1950 The Steel Helmet; 1952 Park Row; 1952
Pickup on South Street; 1955 House of Bamboo; 1956 Run of the Arrow; 1957
China Gate; 1957 Forty Guns; 1958 Verboten!; 1959 The Crimson Kimono ;
1961 Underworld USA; 1962 Merrills Marauders; 1963 Shock Corridor; 1964
The Naked Kiss ; 1980 The Big Red One; 1982 White Dog ; 1984 Thieves
After Dark; 1989 Street of No Return.