Reviewed by Janet Maslin The New York Times Wednesday, November 13, 2002
There are many ways to describe the oeuvre of Samuel Fuller, a.k.a. Slam-Bam Sam, the self-proclaimed "bang-for-the-buck moviemaker" whose brand of pulp fiction has been assimilated and admired by many younger directors. But let an excerpt from Fuller's 1963 "Shock Corridor" speak for his nearly six-decade career. Immortalized by the Library of Congress for, among other things, its feisty image of a man being tackled by a group of crazed nymphomaniacs, the Cold War drama "Shock Corridor" is set in a psychiatric hospital. One patient says:
"I know why I went over to the Commies. Ever since I was a kid, my folks fed me bigotry for breakfast and ignorance for supper. Not once did they ever make me feel proud of where I was born. See, that was the cancer they put in me. No knowledge of my country ... no pride ... just a hymn of hate. I'd have defected to any enemy. See, it was easy because my brains was cabbage. They taught me everything from cabbages to commissars. And they gave me a woman. And she called me mister. And she made me feel important!"
As that illustrates, Fuller wasn't one for tactful understatement. (He died in 1997, at 85.) His hot-blooded, incident-packed autobiography is accordingly blunt. In describing the searing combat experience that eventually went into his film "The Big Red One," he explains that it could never truly be captured in fiction: "For moviegoers to get the idea of real combat, you'd have to shoot at them every so often from either side of the screen." That too offers an idea of the Fuller style.
"A Third Face" is a grand, lively, rambunctious memoir with such broad scope that it takes Fuller from his boyhood sighting of William Randolph Hearst (he was a teenage copy boy at The New York Journal-American, which Hearst owned) to his appearance as a white-haired model at one of Yohji Yamamoto's fashion shows. A wonderful array of 171 photographs immortalizes such adventures and provides interestingly unguarded views of the well-known individuals who figured in Fuller's life. On the back cover, the author can be seen hard at work, peering into a movie camera while pointing a pistol at the sky.
This memoir is packed with figures as incongruous as Al Capone and General George Patton. (Fuller may have taken military orders from Patton in the war, but he refused to direct a movie about a commander whom he loathed.) From John Huston's mother, Rhea Gore, to a worshipful Jim Morrison of the Doors, the book's array of photos and memories is extraordinary. There's a double-vision effect to seeing Fuller with Nicholas Ray, another hard-living, white-haired paterfamilias for hip young filmmakers and another King of the Bs.
Fuller demonstrates typical candor and reverence in describing Jean-Luc Godard after Fuller became a darling of the French New Wave. "I liked the guy, but certainly not because he told me how much my films had influenced him," Fuller says. "I laughed at that. Let's face it, Godard had stolen a bunch of my ideas from 'Pickup on South Street' and 'Underworld, USA' for his early pictures. I didn't mind, but why not call it what it was."
Still, as Fuller's career began to wane, he was increasingly sustained by filmmaker acolytes. Curtis Hanson kept him supplied with typewriter ribbons. Quentin Tarantino joined him on the film festival circuit. Jonathan Demme and Martin Scorsese delighted him with their offer to produce one last Fuller picture. Scorsese's forthcoming "Gangs of New York" recycles the title of an early Fuller crime story.
The model for a director's autobiography remains that of Elia Kazan, a painfully astute self-examination, alert to principle as well as personality and filled with glimpses of great work in the making. Fuller's story has similar sweep, though it often substitutes bluster for introspection. Sometimes he delivers both, as when describing NBC's refusal to show his film "White Dog" because the network found its ideas about race controversial. "My yarn, inappropriate?" he asks. "Here's what's inappropriate: the goddamned way American racists have treated blacks, Hispanics, Asians and everybody who wasn't as white as Shirley Temple."
In "A Third Face," with a title referring to his inner self, Fuller can be found eagerly learning the newspaper business as a teenager "greener than a Martian" and powerfully recalling his extensive combat experience in Sicily, North Africa, Omaha Beach, France and Germany. In his early days as a writer, he turned out novels with the prescient titles "Burn, Baby, Burn" and "Test Tube Baby," among others. By the time he watched Marlene Dietrich perform at a USO show, Fuller was in a position to worm his way to her dressing room and mention a mutual acquaintance. By then Fuller's books had begun to be adapted as movies. The corporal and Dietrich had the same agent.
Although some of this book (completed by his widow, Christa Lang Fuller, and a friend, Jerome Henry Rudes) sounds politely homogenized, Fuller's trademark frankness generally gives his stories a no-nonsense kick. The best legacy to be found here is his frequent, passionate, oracular advice about directing. "Mr. Fuller," an actor once said to him, "Sergeant Zack only has four or five pages of lines in a 90-page script, yet he's on camera most of the time. There's got to be other stuff to say, right?"
"No, my boy," Fuller says he replied. "The other stuff's called acting."
<http://www.iht.com/articles/76707.htm> -- Yoshie
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