Sticking it to the Americans is one of those fun games that Europeans like to play, and for good reason: They can. Especially on cultural matters, more so when they were able to look down their long aristocratic noses at virtually everything we did. But less so now that a creeping plastic ooze of fast food franchises has been laid over their capital cities—all of them packed with Europe’s own high-culture defectors, depressingly attired in full baggy-pantsed hip-hop gear, baseball caps swung backward as though in a diminished fascist salute across the Atlantic. We might be sinking our economy and international influence into the bottomless pit of our absurd Middle Eastern adventures—apparently we didn’t learn anything from watching our one-time even-match-up opponent, the so-called Evil Empire, get rope-a-doped into bankruptcy by the same folks we’re futilely chasing now—but by golly, we’re still the world’s main provider of self-destructing celebrities and fried carbohydrate technology.
Big points always went up on the scoreboard when the French could stuff a sneering zinger into our dull Babbitt-ish faces for our cruel, unwitting neglect of one of our home-grown artistes, whom anyone with any sense and discriminating good taste (that would be the French, of course) could see was a genius, vraiment. On the literary front, that position was held for a long time by blue-collar pulpmeister Jim Thompson, with the French filming tough, slender books such as Pop. 1280, while here in the States the best Thompson could scrape up was an end-of-career gig novelizing old Ironsides episodes.
Film-wise, the French score points off us as well. Their quixotic enthusiasm for Jerry Lewis doesn’t outweigh slam-dunks such as their having virtually airlifted the post-Night and the City Jules Dassin out of the clutches of the House Un-American Activities Committee back in 1954, so he could direct ultimate crime-caper progenitor Rififi. (Not Dassin’s fault, of course, that when we got possession of that particular ball again, we eventually deflated it into the flat, rubberized soufflé of Tom Cruise’s Mission: Impossible flicks.) There were plenty of others. As busily as the prewar Third Reich had shipped Billy Wilder and a boatload of equivalent talent to our shores, after the fighting had stopped we got busy shipping our own back to the Old World.
Of course, we can always play catch-up. Another movie-maker, long appreciated more in Europe than here, recently got his old film cans dusted off. The Criterion Collection, the ongoing, wallet-lightening crack house for film buffs, has brought out spiffy new DVDs of Samuel Fuller’s early works. They’re actually part of Criterion’s new lower-priced (thank God) Eclipse line. The films might not have been restored with the same flyspeck-hunting attention to detail that Criterion’s regular line receives, but the results are still way more watchable than anything cranked out by Hollywood in the last few years. Then again, that would be the case even if Criterion had brought them out as filmstrips you had to hold up to a light bulb to see.
Two of the films—the 1949 I Shot Jesse James and The Steel Helmet from 1951—are notable, especially for cinephiles familiar with Fuller mainly by way of his later, more over-the-top work such as Shock Corridor and The Naked Kiss. (The third film in the new Criterion Eclipse set, The Baron of Arizona, is considered slight even by hardcore Fuller fans—though it’s a useful reminder to Las Vegas locals that their city government didn’t actually invent the whole notion of shady land deals.) Samuel Fuller’s career as a filmmaker began with I Shot Jesse James, and it’s revealing to see how many of his signature traits—the in-your-face close-ups, the jet-propelled narratives, the corrosive cynicism—were there from the beginning.
Journalists, and not just the film-reviewing kind, have always thought well of Fuller, or they do as soon as they find out about him. He’s the archetype of one of their breed—he started out as a hack daily reporter—who looked up at the stuff on the movie-house screens of the day and said, “Christ, I could do better than that." (Modern-day journalists still say as much, though they rarely make the attempt—just as well, really.) Fuller made a literal translation of his newspaper experiences in his self-financed 1952 Park Row, which began a string of commercial flops for him. But even an offbeat Western such as Fuller’s Jesse James hooks up with the world of journalism, and not just because of the degree to which major plot points are communicated by newspaper headlines leaping up on the screen. Fuller’s movie predates John Ford’s 1962 The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance as a meditation-with-horses on the interlocking, contradicting triangle of publicity, celebrity and reality. In our world, the engines of fame and ignominy are more likely to be electronic than print-driven, but it’s the same gears crushing anyone unlucky enough to get caught in them. Then as now, we want the ability to sit in judgment on anyone who escapes anonymity, and if Fuller felt any guilt—not likely—at having made his living at making that process possible, he at least gives his film’s broken murderer the grace of his own death. We live in softer times; people who publicly screw up now can go to rehab for at least temporary redemption, spinning those facilities’ revolving doors like airplane propellers.
The other personality-defining experience in Fuller’s biography was his stretch in the infantry, toting a rifle across a big chunk of World War II’s European front. (That material showed up in 1980, with mixed results, in one of Fuller’s last gigs as a director-screenwriter, The Big Red One.) These days, we pretty much expect any war movie to be less than gung-ho about all things military. Fuller was typically ahead of his time in that regard, with The Steel Helmet’s take on the Korean War jaundiced enough to earn him an FBI investigation. And not just the war; ever the newsman, alert to whatever was going on in the world around him, Fuller managed to work the U.S.’s emerging civil-rights struggle into his movie. A Communist Chinese officer, captured during the movie’s long slog across the battlefield, plays the Americans against each other, reminding the token black medic that the back of the bus is reserved for him when he returns home. Never one for subtlety, Fuller keeps hammering on the issue. As he described it decades later, “We had a scene in the picture, very powerful, where the Manchurian-Chinese prisoner of war, very intelligent, smart ... turns to a Japanese-American GI and says, ‘You have the same damn slant eyes as I. Then how come you fight for these white sons of bitches when you know they hate our guts?’” The movie was enough of a commercial success to lead to a short run of bigger projects, with slightly bigger budgets. But with dialogue like that, it was hardly likely to endear him to government authorities—not that Fuller was ever reported to have cared about that.
It probably didn’t matter to him, either, that the Europeans were getting off on what they might have perceived—mistakenly—as an anti-American streak in his films. In many ways Fuller was one of the most deeply American directors ever—in his later years, he could easily hang out with blow-’em-up flag-wavers such as John Milius. But as Fuller put it, “I don’t care if my characters are American, Russian or Nazi.” Fuller was enough of a narrative craftsman that, ultimately, we don’t care either. The value of his early film work emerging from the vaults in such near-pristine form is that we can connect again with a storyteller who started out in the uncomfortable, troublemaking position of being more committed to humanity than labels. In other directors’ movies, Fuller’s heroes would be the bad guys; in Fuller’s movies, they’re us.
The First Films of Samuel Fuller
****
Not rated
$44.95