'A Third Face': From Tabloid to Celluloid
_A Third Face: My Tale of Writing, Fighting and Filmmaking_ By Samuel Fuller, with Christa Lang Fuller and Jerome Henry Rudes. Illustrated. 592 pages. $35. Alfred A. Knopf.
By RICHARD SCHICKEL
His first job was as a newsboy. Subsequently he ran errands in a hot-sheets hotel, then became, in rapid succession, personal copy boy to the grandest of William Randolph Hearst's editors, the legendary Arthur Brisbane; a crime reporter on the raffish New York Graphic (where John Huston's mother mentored him) and an itinerant journalist, covering among other subjects the San Francisco general strike of 1935 and the Ku Klux Klan (where he observed a female adherent open her sheet to nurse her baby). Along the way, he published his first pulp novel and wrote his first B-picture screenplay. About the only thing Samuel Fuller didn't achieve in his first quarter-century was a high school diploma. The school of hard knocks claimed (and permanently shaped) him.
To say they don't make 'em like Sam anymore is an understatement. Outside of the pages of Horatio Alger, they weren't making very many like him when he was born in Worcester, Mass., on Aug. 12, 1912. True to the Alger tradition, Fuller's hustling newsboy pluck never deserted him. He was still hopefully pounding out movie ''yarns'' on his battered Royal typewriter when he was in his early 80's. But his luck largely left him sometime in the 1960's, when the old Hollywood system, under which he had flourished, irrevocably changed, marginalizing the market for maverick talents like his. The record of his last three decades (he died in 1997) is mostly one of being cheated financially and watching impotently as his work -- some of it potentially among his best -- was brutally rewritten or re-edited by vulgar spirits and clumsy hands.
His consolation in those later years -- it greatly warms the often chilling last third of his memoir, ''A Third Face'' -- was the respect and affection he received from younger directors, beginning with Jean-Luc Godard and eventually including Martin Scorsese, Wim Wenders, Curtis Hanson, Jim Jarmusch and, indeed, just about everyone who aspired to singularity in post-60's cinema. Small of stature, his white hair combed back into a leonine mane, perpetually wreathed in the smoke of his omnipresent cigar, Fuller was an inspired, uncomplaining teller of tall, true tales -- some drawn from his own improbable life, others from the down-and-dirty lives he observed and omnivorously read about. The implicit moral of his stories was, essentially, ''Stick to your guns.'' The young auteurs also, and quite correctly, adored the best of his films, which, though they shared some of the tropes and tics of the standard genre movies (westerns, war dramas, crime stories), outrageously pushed their conventional envelopes.
Fuller never forgot the lessons of his tabloid days. He had a lifelong taste for the grabby lead, most famously in the opening sequence of ''The Naked Kiss'' (1964), in which a prostitute is beating the tar out of her cheating pimp, in the course of which her wig falls off to reveal a shaved head -- punishment he had meted out for some imaginary transgression. ''Run of the Arrow'' (1957) begins with a Confederate soldier firing the last shot of the Civil War, rifling his fallen foe's pockets for food (and a stogie), then using his body as a picnic table. Fuller once proposed opening another picture with a group of scantily clad hookers arranged against a map of the United States, with one of them making a speech demanding a labor union. The studio didn't go for that one.
The old-fashioned tabloids were different from their modern, gossip-laden descendants. Their specialty wasn't getting the dirt on the rich and famous; it was crime, the more outlandish (and bloody) the better. In his years at The Graphic, Fuller's best sources were pimps, prostitutes, con artists, pickpockets. More important, he came to respect the honor he found among thieves, to loathe middle-class hypocrisy and to understand that, as the screenwriter Robert Towne would eventually, immortally, put it in ''Chinatown'': ''Most people never have to face the fact that at the right time and right place, they're capable of anything.''
When Fuller started directing his own screenplays in 1949, he began expanding -- normalizing, if you will -- the range of human behavior that could be shown on the screen. He did not always do that with great subtlety or with a high regard for pious niceties. Bang: people got dead without moral dither or sentimental regret. This reflected the other great educative force in his life, World War II. He fought it from beginning to end, surviving three invasion beachheads (including Omaha, where he won a Silver Star) and, most rending to his Jewish heart, the liberation of the Falkenau concentration camp. It taught him just how cheap life was, how absurdly it can be taken from us. Ultimately it made him picky about the war movies he made. He turned down ''Patton'' because he despised its self-aggrandizing protagonist. He rejected ''The Young Lions'' because, he writes, it showed ''soldiers praying to God in between combat missions. It sounded good in Hollywood, but it just didn't happen. The truth is that in the middle of a war, you feel more like insulting the Almighty Creator than praying to him.'' He observed of his terrific Korean War movie, ''The Steel Helmet'' (1951), that basically no one -- mothers, fathers, sweethearts -- mourns a fallen soldier very long; give them a few days, and then they forget all about him.
This spirit (he called it realism) was shocking to a lot of finer sensibilities. Some took the view -- Fuller argues with them intermittently throughout his book -- that his toughness was an expression of a fascist temperament (though J. Edgar Hoover, no less, found him soft on Communism). This was all, to borrow a favorite Fuller phrase, ''gibble-gabble.'' As he proudly proclaims, he was a Stevensonian Democrat, with a more-than-Stevensonian need to speak for (and to) the largely inarticulate urban masses -- without patronization, without the kind of Popular Front idealization that had been customary in the movies. Maybe the best scene he ever wrote was in ''Pickup on South Street'' (1953), in which Thelma Ritter, playing a street-corner tie saleswoman who makes the better part of her living as a police informer, refuses to rat out a friend to a Communist hit man. This has nothing to do with politics; it has everything to do with street honor.
She needed what Fuller had at the time, a protector, someone to defend himself from his own exuberance. That was Darryl F. Zanuck, head of production at 20th Century Fox and himself a tough little autodidact and at one time a writer in the Fuller mode, a man who liked liberal ideas and high-energy action. Working six months a year for Fox, six months as an independent, Fuller made his most coherent films. ''How the hell did you ever tolerate working in the factories?'' John Cassavetes, a rebel of a different sort, once asked him, and Fuller's one-word answer was, ''Zanuck,'' who knew how to discipline his imagination without thwarting it.
When Zanuck was forced out of Fox in 1956, Fuller started doing deals on cocktail napkins all over the world. There were 16 years of scrambling between ''The Naked Kiss'' and ''The Big Red One'' (1980), his long-dreamed-of autobiographical film about humble dogfaces surviving World War II. It is shadowed with greatness, but it was brutally edited by the studio, so that the cumulative power you sense in it is constantly interrupted. After that he made ''White Dog'' (1982), about an animal conditioned to attack blacks and the difficulty of retraining such a creature. That film exists as Fuller cut it -- blunt and as metaphorically powerful as any movie ever made about racism. But a cowardly studio shelved it. It seemed to them too hot (that is to say, too bleakly truthful) to handle; ''White Dog'' has never had a proper American release. And that finished Fuller -- except as a legend and exemplar among the cinephiles and cineastes.
''A Third Face'' will burnish that legend. It is drawn from tapes Fuller's second wife, Christa, made with him in his last years; she was assisted by Jerome Henry Rudes, creator of the French-American Film Workshop in France. It captures the unique sound of Fuller talking -- growling, gritty, hypnotic. Its title refers to his belief that we all have the essentially unchanging face we're born with; the one we develop as we confront the duplicitous world; and the third one that only we understand -- and then only in the dark of a restless night. It is the face that's ''privy to your deepest fears, hopes and desires,'' the face that ''can't lie or be lied to.'' It is that face that, for the most part, speaks in this book. Gentlemanly and discreet when it comes to his romantic life, curtly dismissive about all the frauds and cheats he encountered in his long life, full of undaunted idealism about the possibilities of America (and the movies), it is a lot like one of Fuller's best movies -- fast-paced, easily readable but with the sting of harsh realism on every page. The man was an obsessive storyteller and here, posthumously, he has finally found and told his best yarn -- his own.
Richard Schickel reviews movies for Time.
<http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/24/books/review/24SCHICKT.html> -- Yoshie
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