Smart Words About Cinema
A year after its landmark release of Budd Boetticher’s “Ranown” Westerns, Sony showcases another great maverick filmmaker. Samuel Fuller spent most of his career in B pictures, creating ultrapersonal, formula-defying films that got little notice from workaday reviewers but impressed sharp critics like Andrew Sarris and Manny Farber. His streetwise worldview, his voice, his advisedly [...]
[originally published in Steadycam, February 13, 2005; an earlier version of this article was published late 2004 in Queen Anne & Magnolia News] Samuel Fuller—whose credit on his movies always read WRITER PRODUCER • DIRECTOR SAMUEL FULLER with WRITER on top like that—came to Seattle in May 1976 for a special appearance with two of [...]
[Originally published in Movietone News 50, June 1976] As with many of Fuller’s films, Run of the Arrow is finally about nothing less that the United States, even though it is “just” a Western. As a matter of fact, it is perhaps the most conventionally “Western” of Fuller’s Westerns, the only one that really utilizes [...]
[Originally published in Movietone News 50, June 1976] There are two kind of people in The Steel Helmet: those who are dead and those who are about to be; men who have ceased to move anywhere and mean anything, and those whose idiosyncratic, even crazy energy keeps them in motion until they too are stopped [...]
[Originally published in Movietone News 50, June 1976] “I wanted the camera to tilt slightly in one direction and the picture to tilt in another. So when it evens out, we have death. I wanted something weird in the beginning, but when it’s over, dead men are usually horizontal, and everything is simple, on one [...]
[Originally published in Movietone News 50, June 1976] Sam Fuller: “You can always tell about a leaper by the distance his toes are from the edge of either the window or the ledge of the roof he’s threatening to jump from. If you’re covering it, watch those toes. If they stick out, he’s not a [...]
[Originally published in Movietone News 50, June 1976] Sam Fuller visited the Seattle Film Society the weekend of May 8 and, among many other things that happened within 46-and-a-half exhilarating, excruciating, mind-boggling, adrenalin-jagging hours, he told a story about Lazslo Kovacs and The Last Movie, in which Fuller played a movie director for director-of-the-movie Dennis [...]
[originally published in the program for the Grand Illusion Sam Fuller series in 1999] 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 [...]
“What is cinema?” asks New Wave icon Jean-Pierre Belmondo of Sam Fuller in Jean-Luc Godard’s “Pierrot le Fou.” He answers: “Film is like a battleground: love, hate, action, death… In one word, EMOTION.” It doesn’t matter whether Godard or Fuller wrote the line (regardless, Fuller’s gruff, cigar chomping delivery makes it his). It stands as [...]
On Monday, January 23, Turner Classic Movies is showing all four films made by Max Ophuls, the great German director, during his brief tenure in America (when he dropped the “h” and signed his films “Max Opuls”). The evening of “Max Ophuls in Hollywood” is followed by two of his greatest French films, La Ronde [...]
[Originally published in Movietone News 51, August 1976] Uniformed marching bands with twirlers. Red, white, and blue. Frustrated chauffeurs who can’t quite comprehend the world of their passengers. An arrival at the airport by charter plane, covered by an on-the-spot news announcer. The death and funeral of someone named Green(e). A reference to car racing. [...]
By Norman Hale [Originally published in Movietone News 52, October 1976] Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible To feeling as to sight? or art thou but A dagger of the mind, a false creation Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain? —Macbeth In The Tenant Roman Polanski explores again the psychic terrain of guilt, dread, paranoia, fears [...]
The standard wisdom about Orson Welles’s 1946 thriller The Stranger—broadly, that it’s Welles’s weakest film, the runt in his otherwise superlative litter—needs challenging, even if Welles himself seemed mostly disinclined to do so. Only in 1982, three years before his death, did he appear to suggest, to BBC interviewers, that it wasn’t so terrible after [...]
Despite the efforts of such fans as Clint Eastwood, who produced two documentaries on the director, and Martin Scorsese, Budd Boetticher is still a name known mainly to film historians and fans of classic westerns. Boetticher made some of the greatest, purest, most austere westerns of all time: Seven Men From Now (available from Paramount), [...]
[Written in 1996 as part of a cine-bio project that never saw the light of day.] Richard Lester aka Dick Lester Birth: January 19, 1932; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Education: University of Pennsylvania (clinical psychology) My whole metabolism is that I’m inclined to do the sum at the end and then realize that I’ve left out one [...]