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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 jarring style were so distinctive that when American
film criticism underwent a major shakeup in the 1960s, Fuller was
singled out as an exemplary auteur. The French New Wave revered
him and he became an inspiration to later generations of American
independents. Fuller was a writer long before he added directing
to his résumé: New York City crime reporter, at age 17, in the
'20s; pulp novelist (Test Tube Baby?); and a screenwriter at
Columbia by the late '30s. So it's fine that The Samuel Fuller
Collection, almost uniquely among filmmaker boxed sets, should
include some movies directed by others but based on Fuller
scripts or stories; there are five of them, along with two
all-Fuller productions. His early film involvements were minor.
He was one of four writers on It Happened in Hollywood (1937),
the tale of a Tom Mix-like Western star whose career flames out
when talkies arrive. Adventure in Sahara (1938) started life when
omnivorous reader Fuller, invited to make a pitch to a Columbia
exec, improvised on the spot: "William Bligh meets Victor Hugo!"
The whiplash-inducing melodrama that resulted has Paul Kelly
joining the Foreign Legion to avenge his kid brother's death,
caused by the sadistic commandant (C. Henry Gordon) of Fort
Agadez, "the Inferno of the Sahara."
Hard-core Fullerism sets in with Power of the Press (1943).
Although he's credited only for story, the dialogue has Fuller's
headline punch, and of course newspapering was an alternative
universe he knew inside out. A publisher whose once-honest New
York tabloid has been ideologically hijacked is ing to make a
course correction. Minutes after saying, "The power of the press
is the freedom to tell the truth--it is not the freedom to twist
the truth," he's a dead man. The rest of the movie deals with the
efforts of his old friend, small-town newsman Guy Kibbee, to
complete the paper's redemption. Made in mid World War II, the
picture angrily and explicitly likens homegrown demagoguery to
Nazism--and its condemnation of media organizations "playing on
the prejudices of stupid people" has acquired fresh relevance.
Otto Kruger and Victor Jory ("a little Himmler") supply the
villainy, while Lee Tracy steps up to save the day as a
casehardened yellow journalist named Griff. Another Griff (Fuller
loved that moniker) shows up in Shockproof (1949), a fascinating
instance of two auteurs on one movie. Fuller wrote the novel The
Lovers and had first crack at the screenplay; the director was
Douglas Sirk. Cornel Wilde plays a parole officer who falls for
convicted murderer Patricia Knight (Mrs. Wilde at the time). For
most of its length the film sustains genuine ambiguity regarding
the woman: victim or manipulator? gingerly moving toward
reformation, or waiting for the first rtunity to split? We
get inklings of Fuller's 1964 The Naked Kiss. Scandal Sheet
(1952) is one more case of Fuller material handled by another
estimable director: Phil Karlson, a crime drama spet with a
fine sense of frenzy. In this adaptation of Fuller's novel The
Dark Page, Broderick Crawford is a hard-nosed newspaper editor
with machine- delivery and a shrewd crime reporter, John Derek
(quite good), whom he's trained as his spiritual heir. There's a
semi-accidental murder, and then another with nothing accidental
about it. Donna Reed plays Derek's fellow reporter and
underappreciated love interest, and the oft-mocked Rosemary
DeCamp does some juicy character acting in a key role.
These DVD collections are always limited by what company holds
the copyright on which movies. We get only two Sam
Fuller-directed movies here because they're the only two he made
for Columbia (now owned by Sony). One of these is a primo,
in-your-face Fuller title: Underworld U.S.A. (1961), which gave
Cliff Robertson a chance to play a complete slimeball--and he's
the hero! He's also the grownup version of the teenager (David
Kent) who watched his small-time crook of a dad murdered in an
alley, beaten to death by thugs who would go on to become
underworld kingpins. The film observes Robertson's revenge as he
rises in their criminal empire, but the most disturbing scene
centers on Richard Rust as a soft-spoken killer. Two years
earlier, Fuller had made The Crimson Kimono (1959), a much less
successful movie but one with bravely complicated ambitions. Two
Los Angeles detectives (Glenn Corbett and James Shigeta)
investigate the murder of a stripper down in the middle of
Main Street (a scene Fuller filmed without forewarning the local
citizenry). As the case unfolds, both guys--partners, roommates,
and blood brothers since the Korean War--fall in love with the
same key witness (Victoria Shaw). Fuller returned again and again
to the theme of America as a multiracial, multicultural society;
The Crimson Kimono, in addition to many passing tributes to the
Japanese-American community, dares to explore the theme of a
sympathetic minority figure who projects racism onto others.
As with previous Sony boxed sets devoted to Boetticher and
Stanley Kramer, the technical quality of the prints is
first-rate. There are no running commentaries, but several
separate featurettes have Martin Scorsese, Wim Wenders, Curtis
Hanson, Tim Robbins, and Christa and Samantha Fuller paying
informed and affectionate tribute to Samuel Fuller the filmmaker
and Sam Fuller the man. --Richard T. Jameson