The Fuller Monty

New England born director Samuel Michael Fuller, the man who would make the very most with the very least of budget. Less would always seem as more, and Fuller  knew full well how to pulp film, as he would proceed to squeeze both his classic Shock Corridor (1963) and The Naked Kiss (1964) from fate's lemonade. In the B-movie realm, Samuel Fuller was indisputably the keeper of it's gates. One of the finer points of Fuller, is that he hosts a deceptively primitive demeanor in his work. What was most remarkable, was  that his life's works all remained unfettered and modest. As economical as his productions were, the message was always generous. Fuller was never daunted by the idea of approaching a controversial subject as he was one of the first to confront the issue of racial intolerance and he did so irrespective of how uncomfortably nonplussed it would leave his audience, during a time bereft of political correctness.

                                      


Samuel Fuller, for many years penned the screenplays for other people's productions. In 1948, he would finally sit up high in director's chair as he embarked on his maiden filmic voyage with I Shot Jesse James. In the great tradition of Mr D.W Griffith, this film was shot mainly in extreme close-up. Fuller, indeed went the celluloid gamut. He was no stranger to the war movie, the oater and    a retection of journalistic ethics in; Park Row (1952). After this teeth-cutting phase, and having learned his lessons well, Fuller would enlighten us with  his unsung
masterpiece Pickup On South Street (1954). Screened today, Pickup on South Street is still received as the wallop packing curtain raiser for the auteur's sequent dissertations on the crime genre.

                         South Street never went west.     


House of Bamboo (1955) lavishly set in Tokyo, articulates in it's premise, the story of how a criminal gang of former GIs is surreptitiously infiltrated by the army in order to exploit it. Fuller's expert utilization of CinemaScope and the tacit homo-eroticism that exists between an undercover cop played by Robert Stack and the gang leader he is in pursuit of ( Robert Ryan). Fuller's next release would be 1959's The Crimson Kimono, another ideal example of Fuller's aplomb - the inimitable way this director sensitively approaches the subject of interracial relationships. Paradoxically, Fuller would illustrate, sometimes exaggeratedly so, the bleakness and ramifications of urban crime - as seen in the potent no-punch puller Underworld USA (1961).

                          Can somebody help me with this snap?


Shock Corridor and The Naked Kiss respectively, would secure theirs places in the upper rungs of pantheon for the serious French cineaste. These films both convey an obviousness that obliterates  any such possibility of a psychological penetration that for example, the venerated director Nicholas Ray was able to achieve with his earlier noir efforts. This was never a question for ardent fans such as Jean-Luc Godard, who cast an uncredited, cigar-toting Fuller in 1965's Pierrot le Fou; replete with a vehement slogan : "film is a battleground." These very four words themselves would serve as the embodiment of Mr Fuller's cinematic world view , a tenet he held passionately even when his career would ultimately wane.

                     


1989's crime-drama  Street of No Return, based on David Goodis' eponymous novel, would be Fuller's final film. The ground-breaking director passed away in 1997, at the age of 85.