"Samuel Fuller: About Film Noir -- An Interview by Robert Porfirio and James Ursini": <http://www.imagesjournal.com/issue10/features/fuller/>
At 7:07 PM -0700 9/19/03, joanna bujes wrote:
>The Crimson Kimono
***** Crimson Kimono (1959). Pure Fullerian description, a mini-essay. Long-shot of Evergreen Cemetery in Los Angeles. Cut to a white column with a Nisei soldier on it. Cut to a huge stone and an Eisenhower quote that salutes "the men who gave for their country." Cut to another huge stone and a quote by Mark W. Clark, General, USA: "The soldiers who lie here symbolize the fealty and courage of Nisei troops . . . may they rest in honored peace." Cut back to long shot of the white column. This sequence both separates Nisei soldiers (they have their own monument) and links them (through the words of white generals) to the mainstream. This is the larger theme in the film (Kojaku's liminality and his troubled relationship with Charlie). The ending of Crimson Kimono is also descriptive. James Shigeta (Detective Joe Kojaku) guns down the female killer and her story mirrors his own: "It was all in my mind." As she collapses in his arms, Fuller's camera cuts to a series of Asian faces, who look on as the detective holds the dying woman. These cut-ins aren't achieved through eye-line matches and are thus unmotivated by character. Instead, these close-ups function as descriptive commentary that punctuate a theme: Shigeta's fear of his own skin, his own people and their collective gaze at his guilt.
(Grant Tracey, "The Narrative Tabloid of Samuel Fuller," <http://www.imagesjournal.com/issue01/features/fuller3.htm> *****
At 7:07 PM -0700 9/19/03, joanna bujes wrote:
>The Naked Kiss
***** Naked Kiss (1964). The opening sequence implicates the spectator and opens the text up to its social context. Fuller attached the camera to the pimp, and when prostitute Constance Towers (Kelly) belts him, a wonderful gutter poetry is created as the camera shakes. The jarring immediacy of the camera elides spectator with pimp and places us and an exploitive, male-dominated society under direct attack.
<http://www.imagesjournal.com/issue01/features/fuller3.htm> *****
At 8:00 PM -0700 9/19/03, andie nachgeborenen wrote:
> > Pickup on South Street,
>
>A great Sam Fuller flick, definitely!
***** It was once popular to try to locate Fuller's work within a 1960s-1970s political spectrum, but it didn't work out well--he wasn't that sort of thinker. The microfilm-Red agents McGuffin in Pickup, like the uranium in Hitchcock's Notorious (1946), could as easily be 100% pure heroin, or diamonds, or--as Joey tries to persuade Candy--simple, bread-and-butter industrial espionage. And while the dialogue establishes that the film's demimonde characters, in a rough sort of loyalty, uniformly reject the commies, it also establishes that they actually don't know much about what Communism is--except, of course, that it is the enemy.
(Rick J Thompson, "Pickup On South Street," <http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/00/8/cteq/pickup.html>) *****
_Pickup on South Street_ still illuminates a dominant strain in white American working-class culture. -- Yoshie
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