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 [...]
Army of Crime (Kino Lorber) Don’t let the title throw you. The heroes of Robert Guédiguian’s based-on-a-true-story French war drama are not The Dirty Dozen unleashed on the Nazis but a remarkably effective resistance cell formed of French Jews, communists and immigrants—the very “undesirables” targeted by the Nazis for the camps. Guédiguian’s previous films—at least [...]
[Originally published in Movietone News 60-61, February 1979] When he was in Koln, Germany scouting locations for his 1972 film Dead Pigeon on Beethovenstrasse, lifelong newsman Samuel Fuller was invited by a local journal to review any recent picture that had caught his fancy. We are delighted to reprint the result of that invitation here, [...]
[Originally published in Movietone News 66-67, March 1981] Trying to flag down a notion of just how “pure cinema”—Hitchcock’s term—works is tricky. The implication is that there is a level on which film operates which is undetectable by those who are unwilling or untrained. Sounds kinda elitist, I’m sure, but this is probably why many [...]