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Home , Alvarez Kelly, Broken Lance, Call Northside 777, Death of a Gunfighter, Eight Iron Men, Forty Guns

January 27, 2009 (XVIII:3) (1953, 80 min)

Directed and written by Samuel Fuller Based on a story by Produced by Jules Schermer Original Music by Leigh Harline Cinematography by Joseph MacDonald

Richard Widmark...Skip McCoy ...Candy ...Moe Williams Murvyn Vye...Captain Dan Tiger Richard Kiley...Joey Willis Bouchey...Zara Milburn Stone...Detective Winoki Parley Baer...Headquarters Communist in chair

SAMUEL FULLER (August 12, 1912, Worcester, — October 30, 1997, Hollywood, ) has 53 writing credits and 32 directing credits. Some of the films and tv episodes he directed were (1989), Les Voleurs de la nuit/Thieves After Dark (1984), (1982), (1980), "The Iron Horse" (1966-1967), True Story of (1957), Hilda Crane (1956), The View (1964), (1963), "The Virginian" (1962), "The from Pompey's Head (1955), (1954), Hell and High Dick Powell Show" (1962), Merrill's Marauders (1962), Water (1954), How to Marry a Millionaire (1953), Pickup on Underworld U.S.A. (1961), (1959), South Street (1953), Titanic (1953), Niagara (1953), What Price Verboten! (1959), (1957), (1957), Glory (1952), O. Henry's Full House (1952), Viva Zapata! (1952), China Gate (1957), (1955), Hell and High Panic in the Streets (1950), Pinky (1949), It Happens Every Water (1954), Pickup on South Street (1953), Park Row (1952), Spring (1949), Down to the Sea in Ships (1949), Fixed Bayonets! (1951), (1951), The Baron of (1948), (1948), Arizona (1950), and (1949). (1948), My Darling Clementine (1946), The Big Noise (1944), Little Tokyo, U.S.A. (1942), The Postman Didn't Ring (1942), The Man Who Wouldn't Die (1942), and in Rio (1941). JOSEPH MACDONALD (December 15, 1906, City, Mexico—May 26, 1968, Woodland Hills, , California) has 74 cinematography credits. He was nominated for (December 26, 1914, Sunrise, Minnesota— three best cinematography Oscars: The Sand Pebbles (1966), Pepe March 24, 2008, Roxbury, Connecticut) has 75 acting credits, (1959), and The Young Lions (1958). Some of his other films are among them True Colors (1991), A Gathering of Old Men (1987), Mackenna's Gold (1969), (1966), Rio Conchos Against All Odds (1984), National Lampoon Goes to the Movies (1964), Invitation to a Gunfighter (1964), The Carpetbaggers (1982), The Swarm (1978), Coma (1978), (1964), (1964), (1963), The (1977), Twilight's Last Gleaming (1977), Murder on the Orient List of Adrian Messenger (1963), 40 Pounds of Trouble (1962), Express (1974), "" (1972-1973), Death of a Gunfighter Taras Bulba (1962), Walk on the Wild Side (1962), The Gallant (1969), Madigan (1968), Alvarez Kelly (1966), The Bedford Hours (1960), Warlock (1959), Ten North Frederick (1958), Will Incident (1965), (1964), How the West Was Success Spoil Rock Hunter? (1957), A Hatful of Rain (1957), The Won (1962), (1961), The Alamo (1960), Fuller—PICKUP ON SOUTH STREET—2

Warlock (1959), The Tunnel of Love (1958), The Law and Jake "Biography" (1995-1998), "Picket Fences" (1992-1994), "The Wade (1958), Saint Joan (1957), (1954), Hell and Ray Bradbury Theater" (1992), Howard the Duck (1986), "The High Water (1954), Take the High Ground! (1953), Pickup on Twilight Zone" (1986), Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1985), South Street (1953), Destination Gobi (1953), Red Skies of "The Thorn Birds" (1983), Jesus (1979), The New Media Bible: Montana (1952), Halls of Montezuma (1950), No Way Out (1950), The Gospel According to St. Luke (1979), Looking for Mr. Panic in the Streets (1950), Night and the City (1950), Slattery's Goodbar (1977), "Hawaii Five-O" (1976), The Little Prince Hurricane (1949), Down to the Sea in Ships (1949), Yellow Sky (1974), "Cannon" (1974), "" (1970-1973), "Medical (1948), Road House (1948), and Kiss of Death (1947). He Center" (1971), "" (1970), "" (1970), received only one Oscar nomination—for best supporting actor as "Slattery's People" (1964), "The Defenders" (1961-1964), "The the giggling psychopath Tommy Yudo in Kiss of Death. Nurses" (1964), "Ben Casey" (1964), "The Alfred Hitchcock Hour" (1963), "Dr. Kildare" (1961), "The Steel JEAN PETERS (October 15, 1926, Canton, Ohio—October 13, Hour" (1953-1961), "Playhouse 90" (1957-1958), The Power of 2000, Carlsbad, California) has only 23 acting credits, among the Resurrection (1958), (1957), "Studio One" them: "Murder, She Wrote" (1988), Winesburg, Ohio (1973), A (1951-1957), The Phoenix City Story (1955), "General Electric Man Called Peter (1955), Broken Lance (1954), Apache (1954), Theater" (1955), Blackboard Jungle (1955), "Campbell Three Coins in the Fountain (1954), Pickup on South Street Playhouse" (1954), "Kraft Television Theatre" (1954), "The (1953), Niagara (1953), (1952), Wait Till Revlon Mirror Theater" (1953), Pickup on South Street (1953) the Sun Shines, Nellie (1952), Viva Zapata! (1952), Anne of the (1952), "" (1950-1952), The Sniper Indies (1951), Take Care of My Little Girl (1951), As Young as (1952), and "Robert Montgomery Presents" (1950). You Feel (1951), (1950), (1949), Deep Waters (1948), and MILBURN STONE ( July 5, 1904, Burrton, Kansas—June 12, 1980, (1947). La Jolla, California) appeared in 166 films and TV series, some of which were "Gunsmoke" (1955-1975), "Climax!" (1958), Smoke THELMA RITTER (February 14, 1905, Brooklyn, New York— Signal (1955), White Feather (1955), (1955), February 5, 1969, New York) has 42 acting credits. She was Black Tuesday (1954), Siege at Red River (1954), Arrowhead nominated for six best supporting actress Oscars: Birdman of (1953), Second Chance (1953), Pickup on South Street (1953), Alcatraz (1962), Pillow Talk (1959), Pickup on South Street The Sun Shines Bright (1953), Invaders from Mars (1953), The (1953), With a Song in My Heart (1952), The Mating Season Savage (1952), "" (1952), The Atomic City (1952), The (1951), and All About Eve (1950). Some of her other films were Racket (1951), Roadblock (1951), Leathernecks (1951), What's So Bad About Feeling Good? (1968), The Incident (1967), "Adventures of Wild Bill Hickok" (1951), Operation Pacific For Love or Money (1963), How the West Was Won (1962), (1951), Branded (1950), The Fireball (1950), Snow Dog (1950), "Wagon Train" (1962), The Misfits (1961), "General Electric No Man of Her Own (1950), Calamity Jane and Sam Bass (1949), Theater" (1960), A Hole in the Head (1959), The Proud and Train to Alcatraz (1948), Cass Timberlane (1947), The Michigan Profane (1956), "Alfred Hitchcock Presents" (1956), Lucy Gallant Kid (1947), Her Adventurous Night (1946), The Spider Woman (1955), "Goodyear Television Playhouse" (1955), Rear Window Strikes Back (1946), The Daltons Ride Again (1945), The Royal (1954), The Farmer Takes a Wife (1953), Titanic (1953), As Mounted Rides Again (1945), The Frozen Ghost (1945), Enemy Young as You Feel (1951), The Mating Season (1951), I'll Get By Bacteria (1945), Moon Over Las Vegas (1944), Hat Check Honey (1950), City Across the River (1949), A Letter to Three Wives (1944), Sherlock Holmes Faces Death (1943), Captive Wild (1949), and Miracle on 34th Street (1947). Woman (1943), Police Bullets (1942), Reap the Wild Wind (1942), Death Valley Outlaws (1941), The Great Train Robbery (1941), MURVYN VYE (July 15, 1913, Quincy, Massachusetts—August The Great Plane Robbery (1940), Nick Carter, Master Detective 17, 1976, Pompano Beach, Florida) has 89 acting credits, (1939), Sky Patrol (1939), Young Mr. Lincoln (1939), Paroled including "Gentle Ben" (1967), "The Defenders" (1964), "The from the Big House (1938), Wives Under Suspicion (1938), Virginian" (1963), "The Beverly Hillbillies" (1963), "The Lucy Federal Bullets (1937), Blazing Barriers (1937), Rose Bowl Show" (1962), "Wagon Train" (1960-1962),"The Untouchables" (1936), China Clipper (1936), The Milky Way (1936), The (1961-1962), The George Raft Story (1961), "" Fighting Marines (1935), and Ladies Crave Excitement (1935). (1960), "Bonanza" (1960), "Maverick" (1959), Al Capone (1959), "" (1959), "Perry Mason" (1959), Rally 'Round the SAM FULLER from World Film Directors, V. II. Ed . John Flag, Boys! (1958), "Studio One" (1950-1958), "Have Gun - Will Wakeman. The H.W. Wilson Co., NY, 1988. Travel" (1957), The Best Things in Life Are Free (1956), "Damon Runyon Theater" (1955), "" (1955), Black American director, scenarist, and producer, born in Worcester, Horse Canyon (1954), River of No Return (1954), Pickup on Massachusetts. and grew up there and in New York City, where South Street (1953), Destination Gobi (1953), Road to Bali his family later moved. He was a small, pugnacious, and street- (1952), "Lights Out" (1951-1952),"The Philco Television wise child who at the age of eleven became a stentorian hawker of Playhouse" (1952), "Lux Video Theatre" (1951), A Connecticut newspapers—he says he “learned early that it’s not the headline Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1949), and Golden Earrings that counts but how hard you shout it,” and his films show that he (1947). never forgot that lesson. At thirteen Fuller quit school to work as a copyboy on RICHARD KILEY (March 31, 1922, Chicago, Illinois—March 5, the New York Journal, where two years later he became personal 1999, Warwick, New York) has 135 acting credits, some of which copyboy to Hearst’s crusading editor Arthur Brisbane. When are Nice Shot (2001), Blue Moon (1999), Patch Adams (1998), Brisbane quarreled with his boss and left, Fuller moved for a time Fuller—PICKUP ON SOUTH STREET—3 to the New York Graphic and then, in 1928, joined the San Diego and the target of ambitious young gunmen. Still hoping to buy s Sun as one of the youngest crime reporters in the United States. home and win Cynthy, he undertakes to reenact his crime on stage Thereafter, Fuller says, he “traveled all over the United States….I but cannot go through with the travesty. In the end, he deliberately was involved in strikes, executions, and that kind of thing. I taunts Cynthy’s other admirer Kelly (Preston Foster) into killing interviewed lots of people, murderers who had committed him. appalling crimes….Then I wandered like a tramp through the Phil Hardy, in his 1970 monograph on Fuller, wrote that Southern states in freight trains. This was during the Depression. some scenes—”the confrontations with the ballad singer and the Then one day in San Francisco I started writing stories.” adolescent gunmen , the attempted reenactment of the murder and In 1935 Fuller published a pulp novel, Burn Baby Burn. the earlier confrontations of Jesse and Bob—completely transcend Others followed, some of them written under pseudonyms, and in their plot origins,” depicting “not a character wending his way to 1936 he collaborated on his first movie script, Hats Off, directed the story’s close but the concretization, in huge close-ups, of by Boris Petroff. He subsequently had a hand in the scripts of something akin to a combination of the Fall and the murder of ’s It Happened in Abel.” Another critic has found the Hollywood (1937), James film “constructed almost entirely Cruze’s Gangs of New York of close-ups of an oppressive (1938), and Nick Grinde’s intensity the cinema has not Federal Manhunt (1938), also experienced since Dreyer’s The providing the original stories of Passion of Joan of Arc.” Adventure in the Sahara (1938), But these are later Bowery Boy (1940), Confirm or judgments, informed by years of Deny (1941), and The Power of earnest discussion of Fuller’s the Press (1942). brutal style. At the time of its Fuller joined the army release, I Shot Jesse James did not as an enlisted man in 1942. He attract much attention, and neither served with the First Infantry did , which Division—known as the “Big followed in 1950. This stars Red One” on account of its as James Addison famous shoulder patch—in Reavis, a land office clerk with North Africa, Sicily, Germany intentions of grandeur. He spends and , winding up years falsifying records in a with the rank of corporal. Fuller Spanish monastery, plants phony earned the Bronze Star in Sicily, he says, “for capturing a group of tombs in old graveyards, and in these and other ways invents Germans and bringing them in” and the in Normandy convincing evidence that Sofia (Ellen Drew), an orphan girl, is for “making a run along and getting a message to sole heir to the territory of Arizona. Colonel George Taylor. “ He also received a , along Sofia herself is similarly “falsified,” molded into an with a bullet in the chest. Daniel Selznick, in his article about aristocrat. Reavis then marries her and installs himself as “Baron Fuller in Magazine (May 4, 1980), plausibly of Arizona.” But his education of Sofia has worked too well. She maintains that his “experiences in World War II shaped his life has become an aristocrat—in spirit if not in fact—and in the end and art.” she loves but also dominates her Pygmalion, forcing him to While Fuller was overseas, his novel The Dark Page had confess his forgeries and pay the penalty. Some reviewers were been sold to the movies—it was filmed as Scandal Sheet—and bored by this strange, obsessive film, but David Pirie praised its after the war he went back to work as a scenarist for Warner photography (by ) and its Gothic Brothers and other studios. He contributed to the script of Gangs extravagances, perceiving Reavis as “a kind of super-anti-hero, of the Waterfront (1945), a remake of Gangs of New York, and who wishes to invade not merely the present or future, but the devised the story of ’s (1948). Invited by past.” Lippert Productions to script some low-budget Westerns, Fuller The movie establishment first began to take notice of told Robert Lippert: “You pay me minimum and let me write and Sam Fuller when The Steel Helmet (1950), made for Lippert in ten direct.” Lippert liked the idea of paying minimum rates, Fuller or twelve days on a budget of $100,000, grossed over $6 million says, and so, at the age of thirty-eight, he made his first movie, I in the United States and Canada alone. The first of Fuller’s war Shot Jesse James. It was filmed in ten days on a budget of films, it studies the behavior of an American patrol, drawn from $118,000, of which $5,000 was Fuller’s salary. assorted racial stock, who occupy a Buddhist temple in Korea. It I Shot Jesse James (1949), based on a story by Homer is characteristic of Fuller that the movie shows both the irrational Croy and scripted like virtually all of Fuller’s films by himself, of the white Americans and the irrational patriotism of the has as its protagonist the “dirty little coward” Bob Ford (John two GIs who have suffered most from such prejudice, a black and Ireland), a member of the James gang. Wounded in a bank raid, he a Nisei. The dominant image throughout is a massive statue of the is saved by Jesse James (Reed Hadley), who takes him into his Buddha which, as Phil Hardy says, “is used as the central home and cares for him like a son. But Cynthy (Barbara Britton), structure upon which camera movements are based and around the girl Ford loves, wants him to go straight, and when amnesty is which action takes place”—even the chauvinistic Zack (Gene promised to the killer of Jesse James, Ford swallows his scruples Evans) clings desperately to the statue during the Communist and murders his benefactor. As a result, he finds himself attack, cradled in its arms, and in this and other ways it ostracized as a Judas figure, the subject of contemptuous ballads Fuller—PICKUP ON SOUTH STREET—4

“concretizes the search for a transcendent source of identity and to death. and helps to smash the spy ring. Candy recovers, and she allegiance that permeates Fuller’s films.” and Skip set out to make a new life together. Another preoccupation in The Steel Helmet, soon to Pickup on South Street won the Bronze Lion at Venice become a familiar motif in Fuller’s pictures, is with deception, but seemed to many contemporary reviewers a crass piece of masquerade, and false appearances—a soldier disguised as a propaganda in which the amorality and brutality of its priest, a booby-trapped corpse, a man’s whistling that is mistaken protagonists is forgiven them as soon as they commit themselves for the noise of shells. Bosley Crowther called this the “first to the struggle against Communism. However, some critics now fiction film in circulation on the subject of the ,” and regard this as one of the best of Fuller’s films. For Frank Fuller himself was proud of his “scoop” in making the first McConnell, for example, it brilliantly combines the conventions cinematic reference to the concentration camp for Nisei in of the and the traditional thriller, “thereby redefining the Arizona during world War II. Financially successful as it was, The assumptions of each (both moral and filmic) and transcending Steel Helmet is marred by the patent artificiality of some of the them for a new genre, a new way of seeing the world.” sets—Fuller admitted that, needing a tank in one scene, he could Specifically, McConnell believes, the film established “the afford nothing better than a cardboard cutout. cinematic myth of liberating sexuality we have since come to His next picture was his first for a major studio, associate with the films of and Sam Peckinpah.” Twentieth Century-Fox. Fixed Bayonets (1951) is another Korean Hell and High Water (1954) tells a fundamentally similar war story, based on a novel by John Brophy and centering on a story in terms of a quite different genre, with Widmark again sensitive book-lover, Corporal Denno (Richard Basehart), and his playing a cynic who is converted to patriotism. Here he is Adam education in war. A reluctant leader, he finds the responsibilities Jones, a mercenary hired by a foreign consortium to command of command thrust upon him when first his officer and then his submarine investigation of suspicious Chinese activity off the two sergeants die in a savagely fought rear guard action. coast of Alaska. The consortium is led by a scientist (Victor Obviously intended to capitalize on the success of The Steel Francen) who, though he is not himself American, regards the Helmet, this film is an effective but less personal and original United States as the potential savior of the “Free World” and died work. a martyr to that faith. Fox asked Fuller to make this Cinemascope Fuller set up his own production company to make Park movie in order to demonstrate (for the benefit of the nervous) that Row (1952), his homage to the newspaper industry and (as he put it was possible to use conventional camera movements with a it, with his usual sincere sentimentality) “the story of my heart.” scope lens in an enclosed space (the submarine)—a task Fuller set at the turn of the century, it deals with Merganthaler’s performed with characteristic panache. invention of Linotype and the beginning of the circulation wars, in “Throughout Fuller,” writes Phil Hardy, “wartime a story about the sometimes violent competition between two friendships are seen as the most concrete loyalty ties.” In Hell and New York newspapers and the love affair between their owners High Water, Adam Jones seeks out his wartime crew to man his (played by and Mary Welch). Fuller’s delight in the mercenary submarine, and in House of Bamboo (1955), Sandy history, techniques, legends, and myths of his first profession is () enlists ex-GIs to create a gang, organized like a everywhere evident, but the movie failed at military unit, that takes over the Tokyo the box office and the director lost most of rackets. Sergeant Kenner of the American the $200,000 he had personally invested in military police () is assigned to it. infiltrate and destroy the organization and There followed three films made succeeds with the help of Mariko (Shirley for 20th Century-Fox, beginning in 1953 Yamaguchi), the Japanese widow of a with Pickup on South Street. Very freely former gang member whose wartime buddy adapted by Fuller from a story by Dwight Kenner impersonates. Taylor, it has an excellent performance by House of Bamboo was scripted by Richard Widmark as Skip McCoy, a petty Harry Kleiner, with Fuller credited for once thief who steals a girl’s purse in the subway as the author of additional dialogue only, and finds himself in possession of a but the film nevertheless reflects the mysterious roll of microfilm. The girl, director’s preoccupation with national Candy (Jean Peters), had believed she was identity, conflicting loyalties, and renegacy. helping her boyfriend Joey (Richard Kiley) in an “innocent” piece These concerns are central in Run of the Arrow (1957), one of the of industrial espionage; in fact, Joey is a Communist agent, and most admired of Fuller’s films and the first of six made by his the microfilm contains American military secrets. second independent production company, Globe Enterprises, for The FBI track Skip down through his friend Moe all of which the director was also his own scenarist and producer. (Thelma Ritter), a professional informer towards whom Skip Run of the Arrow begins with O’Meara (), a characteristically feels no rancor. But Skip has no use for white Southerner, firing the last shot of the Civil War, wounding “patriotic eyewash” and rebuffing the FBI, decides to auction the Lieutenant Driscoll (). Refusing to accept the defeat microfilm to the highest bidders, even if they are Communists. of the South and its integration into the Union, he goes west into This heresy disgusts not only the FBI but even Skip’s fellow Indian territory and joins the Sioux. Lieutenant Driscoll (also the criminals. Candy, however, at first repelled by his cynicism, is name of the arrogant young officer in The Steel Helmet) is posted soon in love with him. She agrees to act as a double agent for the to the same area and attempts to build a fort on Indian land, FBI in order to save Skip from himself, is found out by Joey, and provoking an uprising of dissident Sioux. Driscoll is captured and shot. Now at last Skip sees where his loyalty lies, beats Joey half is to be skinned alive. O’Meara—a white man after all—cannot stomach this barbarism and kills Driscoll with the bullet that had Fuller—PICKUP ON SOUTH STREET—5 previously only wounded him. For O’Meara, this mercy killing is reissue that “no …so blatantly exploits the genre’s the real end of the Civil War. With his Indian wife and their eroticism,”and went on: “The film’s graphic boldness, narrative adopted child, he leads the survivors of the attack back into the ellipses, bizarre editing, and conjunction of the cliché and the United States. shockingly unexpected had an enormous influence on Godard, Sam Fuller is a didactic patriot whose films express an who found it ‘so bursting with daring conceptions that it reminds almost mystical faith in America’s destiny but also record—and one of the extravagances of Abel Gance or Stroheim, or purely indeed sensationalize—its sins and failings, in a way that has and simply of Murnau.’” reminded several critics of the methods of popular journalism. It is interesting to consider how closely Godard’s None of his films expresses his “romantic nationalism” more fondness for quotations, written and spoken, echoes Fuller’s directly (or more optimistically) than Run of the Arrow. Fuller can enthusiasm for newspaper headlines, newsreels, posters, signs, endorse O’Meara’s pride in his Southern culture and the Indians’ and other documents, used in a way that is sometimes ironic but pride in theirs, but, as Phil Hardy says, his ideal “is racial-cultural more often didactic or polemical. In Verboten! (1958), about a pride as a stepping-stone to the realization of one’s transcendent neo-Nazi organization code-named Werwolf in occupied allegiance to America, good or bad.” It was at this stage of Germany, the written word is everywhere—huge posters of Fuller’s career that his work began to attract the enthusiastic wanted Nazis, walls covered with graffiti. And it is newsreel attention of the French critics writing in Cahiers de Cinéma, footage of the death camps that teaches the heroine’s young where proclaimed that Run of the Arrow was “the brother the truth about the Nazi era, leading him to betray his best Western to reach our shores since Shane and High Noon.” fellow Werewolves. According to Luc Moullet, Verboten! is Similar themes are explored in China Gate (1957), in composed of less than one hundred shots, one of them over five which the Eurasian heroine Lucky Legs (), minutes long. And Peter Wollen remarked of the same film that though she has been deserted by her American husband (Gene Fuller “manages to combine being an action director—almost the Barry), helps him and a force of French Foreign Legionnaires to nonpareil of action directors—with unusually long takes and blow up a North Vietnamese supply dump at the cost of her own incredibly involved camera set-ups.” life. Her sole motive is to earn for her small son the privilege of Another violent sermon on America and Americanism growing up in America. Nat King Cole appears (and sings) in the followed in The Crimson Kimono (1958), set in Los Angeles. Joe film as a veteran of the Korean War who intends to go on fighting Kojaku () is a Nisei police detective ashamed of his with any army that will have him as long as there are still Japanese blood, which he regards as a handicap both in his career Commies to be killed. and in his pursuit of the white American girl Chris (Victoria A cut-rate production, in which not even Fuller’s Shaw) he meets while investigating the murder of a Little Tokyo ingenuity can disguise the “plaster and lath” sets, it nevertheless is stripper. In a “friendly” Kendo bout with his white partner Charlie full of audacious touches, like the famous shot of Angie (Glenn Corbett), who also loves Chris, Joe gives way to his own Dickinson’s legs stretching the width of the Cinemascope screen paranoid racism and dishonors his cultural heritage by battering when we see her first. And the movie is an even greater “scoop” Charlie unconscious. than The Steel Helmet: the first American feature to deal with the Gradually, however, Joe comes to accept and share struggle for Vietnam—”the barrier between Communism and the Chris’ respect for his cultural heritage, and after a final chase in Free world”—it included a newsreel biography of Ho Chi Minh which he rescues her from the deranged killer, he is able to free long before he became a world figure. himself from is paranoid delusions. In this FIlm. writes Lydna While American critics continued to dismiss Fuller as a Myles, Fuller uses “the conventional police-thriller genre as a purveyor of violent and semiliterate trash, foreign interest in his framework for a complex study of racialism,” described by style was growing, and his French admirers greeted Forty Guns another critic as an “astonishing mixture of naiveté and near- (1957) with something like adulation. This “operatic” range-war metaphysical symbolism.” Phil Hardy pointed out that “all Western has Barbara Stanwyck as a whip-cracking rancher with a Fuller’s Asian Films face the realities of racial and cultural private army to enforce her tyrannies and Barry Sullivan as the conflict, but the line from The Steel Helmet to The Crimson retired gunfighter who, in spite of his repressed desire for her, is Kimono traces a steady path towards the achievement of cultural forced to buckle on his gunbelt to curb her power. pluralism as a means to American unity.” Forty Guns is full of the long and complex shots that But Hardy identifies another”steady path” in the Fuller loves, like the one in which Barry Sullivan takes an arrest development of Fuller’s wok—from optimism to pessimism about warrant to the ranch and we follow it down the length of a table America’s future. The early films, while recording the moral that seats twenty gunmen on either side. The movie is also a squalor and deep divisions in American society, proclaimed as a textbook example of Fuller’s use of dissolves which, as Phil mater of almost religious faith that the sickness could be healed; Hardy says, he employs mainly “for the purpose of compression: faith was fading by the time that Fuller made Underworld USA the narrative in the second half of Forty Guns is handled almost (1961). which Hardy regards as “a key film in Fuller’s descent entirely with dissolves.The effect of the dissolve here is rather into pessimism.” It portrays an America threatened not by foreign similar to that of turning the page in a book or newspaper.” powers or alien ideologies but by the apathy of its own people, Among the film’s other notable inventions is the much emulated who have allowed their institutions to fall into the hands of shot in which we observe a character through the telescopic sight organized crime. on a rifle. Like Sandy’s gang in House of Bamboo, the monstrous In 1980 Twentieth Century-Fox, which had distributed crime syndicate that calls itself “National Projects” is organized Forty Guns, revived it in an excellent new print. Philip French, along military lines, and so is Fuller’s version of the FBI. The noting that the picture had been largely ignored by British and latter is losing the war, but (again as in House of Bamboo) the American reviewers at the time of its first release, wrote of the tables are turned by a man who infiltrates National Projects and Fuller—PICKUP ON SOUTH STREET—6 wins the admiration and affection of one of its leaders. This time, Barratt is more interested in a pulitzer Prize than in truth for its however, the infiltrator is not an undercover policeman but a petty own sake, and his editor is shown to be wholly cynical. If (as criminal named Tolly Devlin () who as a child had many critics supposed) the asylum is intended as a microcosm of seen his father beaten to death in an alley by the smooth thugs America, it is a grotesque vision indeed, full of victims of a sick who now control National Projects. His concern is not with justice society (like a black man who imagines himself to be the Imperial but with revenge, and in the end, having destroyed his father’s Wizard of the KKK and a whole ward of “nymphos”). In this murderers, he dies in the same alley. environment Johnny begins to crack, and though he does discover There is a famous example of Fuller’s genius for the murderer and earn his Pulitzer, he is by then a “schizophrenic narrative economy near the beginning of Underworld USA: from a catatonic” and a permanent resident of the asylum. shot of the young Tolly Devlin twisting the sheet on his Variety’s reviewer found Shock Corridor “so grotesque, reformatory bed during a nightmare about his father’s death, so gruelling, so shallow and so shoddily sensational that...Fuller’s Fuller dissolves to a shot of Devlin as an adult thief twisting the message is devastated.” Many critics agreed, and there was a combination on a safe. The movie also makes particularly pointed similar reception for The Naked Kiss (1964). It opens with a use of the printed word, ironically contrasting posters encouraging shocking pre-credit sequence (shot partly with cameras harnessed Americans to social responsibility with newspaper headlines to the actors) in which we see a furious woman beating a man revealing a nation in thrall to gangsterism. with her handbag. He grabs at her and her wig comes off, “It is one of the many revealing that she is totally bald. we contradictions in Fuller’s work that the learn that the woman is Kelly most necessary social actions are (), a prostitute whose performed by the most antisocial head had been shaved as a punishment characters,” wrote V.F. Perkins, but by the man she was beating, her pimp. Underworld USA, as he says, “goes Kelly goes away to a small town in New further than any…[earlier] Fuller movie England and starts a new life as a nurse in depicting the hero as psychopath.” in a children’s hospital. In due course Perkins describes this as Fuller’s “most she becomes engaged to Grant (Michael brutal picture. It adopts the method of Dante), a rich and handsome Korean the crime reporter more completely than War veteran. But he is also a molester of either Pickup on South Street or The children, and, discovering this, Kelly Crimson Kimono. The film has the beats him to death with a telephone in a urgency of an on-the-spot report. grim reprise of the pre-credit sequence. Fuller’s images reproduce with This indictment of American extraordinary accuracy the texture of newspaper hypocrisy polarized opinion about Fuller. The movie includes photographs….Every shot is a smack-in-the-eye. Every cut is a self-conscious references to Shock Corridor and Fuller’s novel shock cut….Style and content are united in an attack upon the The Dark Page, and hostile reviewers decided that the adulation of film’s audience” who “gullible, apathetic and gutless,” have foreign reviewers had turned the director’s head in a movie that allowed the “punks” to take over. was described by Ian Cristie as “overacted, overwritten, Underworld USA was the last picture produced by overwrought, oversentimental, outrageously improbable [and] Fuller’s Globe Enterprises. His next film was made for Warner amazingly naive.” On the other hand Phil Hardy, while Brothers. Merrill’s Marauders was adapted from a book by acknowledging that The Naked Kiss was “Fuller’s most difficult Charlton Ogburn Jr. by Fuller and Milton Sperling, and produced film to come to grips with,” claimed that it was nevertheless “not by the latter. Set during the Burma campaign of World War II, it only one of Fuller’s most important films but one of the key films star Jeff Chandler as a dedicated commander who, placing duty of the sixties….The Naked Kiss may be a moral tract, but it uses above personal feeling, drives his beloved regiment on and on, the cinema for its medium; its virtues rest not on the rightness of from one battle to another, until the flawless fighting machine he its moral but on Fuller’s transformation of ethics into aesthetics.” has created is utterly destroyed and he himself is dead. And then “The essence of Fuller’s style,” Hardy says, “lies in his protegé, the humanitarian Stock (Ty Hardin), at last realizes creating dramatic confrontations by disrupting the spatial unity of that Merrill has been right about the supreme importance of a scene; the sacrifice of external naturalism to internal loyalty and discipline and rouses the exhausted Marauders for significance.” Peter Wollen, similarly, maintains that “Fuller’s their final battle. cinema is the opposite of naturalist cinema. He shows moral Merrill’s Marauders can be seen as a nostalgic qualities. Not physical appearances.” In Shock Corridor and The celebration of the selfless heroism that had been lost in the Naked Kiss, he had moved further beyond “external naturalism” America of Underworld USA. And Fuller’s pessimism deepened than his audiences were prepared to follow, and both films were in Shock Corridor (1963), the first of two movies he wrote, financial failures. Caine (1967), also known as Shark, was produced and directed for Leon Fromks and Sam Firks. This time another. An adventure story based on a book by Vincent Canning the hero is a crime reporter, Johnny Barratt () who, and starring , it was almost abandoned when a with the collusion of his editor and a doctor, but against the Mexican stuntman was killed by a shark, and was then disowned instincts of his stripper girlfriend (Constance Towers), has himself by Fuller in a dispute over editing. committed to a mental hospital in order to discover who had Five years passed after that before Fuller completed his committed a murder there. next movie, Dead Pigeon on Beethoven Street (1972), made and Such a plot could be put to work in an upbeat picture set in West Germany. Glenn Corbett plays an American private about a crusading journalist like those in Park Row. But Johnny detective (named Sandy, like the gang leader in House of Fuller—PICKUP ON SOUTH STREET—7

Bamboo) who goes to Bonn to take over a case that has already child in a concentration camp, the pregnant woman who must be cost his partner’s life. It concerns an international blackmail gang delivered on a battlefield—are close to cliché but, as Derek that uses a woman (Christa Lang) to lure vulnerable statesmen to Malcolm wrote, such scenes work “because the melodrama is a place where they are drugged and then photographed in supported by real emotion, not fake sensibility.” compromising circumstances. Sandy infiltrates the gang and falls The Big Red One was a solid commercial success, and in love with Christa, but in the end she betrays him. In a frenzied Fuller went on to film White Dog, based on a story by his old final battle, filmed “in a staggering series of jump cuts,” Sandy friend, . This was originally scripted by Curtis kills the gang’s leader (Anton Diffring) but died himself, just as Hanson and assigned by Paramount to . After the his partner had in the picture’s opening sequence, under the latter’s flight to Europe, Fuller accepted this controversial project Beethovenstrasse street sign. and made major alterations to the script. It tells the story of a Georges Robinson called Dead Pigeon “a work of young actress (Kristy McNichol) who finds a dog which, she staggering complexity and surprising self-consciousness,” as well discovers, has been trained to attack blacks. A black animal as the bleakest of all Fuller’s films. in which the hopeless trained (Paul Winfield), dedicated and obsessed, sets out to cure circularity of the plot “is augmented by some of Fuller’s most the animal of its racism, The movie’s “inflammatory” subject deterministic camera movements.” Fragmented images and matter has so far prevented its release. Thieves in the Night elliptical cutting further a sense of disorder in a world of (1983), a French production dubbed into English was described by deception, manipulation, and doublecross.One reviewer wrote that J. Hoberman as “a lame addition to the Bonnie and Clyde “beginning a bit like The Maltese Falcon,” it ends “somewhat like misunderstood-lovers-on-the-run genre.... Virtually the only Breathless. “ Admired as it was by some critics, Dead Pigeon respite comes in the form of cameos by and Fuller achieved only limited distribution, and for a time it seemed that himself (as a one-eyed jewelry fence).” Fuller’s career was over. In 1959 Cahiers du Cinéma called Orson Welles and When at last he did start work on another project, it was Sam Fuller respectively the Shakespeare and Marlowe of one he had announced as early as 1956—a film drawing on his American film. At the opposite extreme are critics like Richard experiences as a soldier with the First Infantry Division, The Big Roud, who declares himself repelled by Fuller’s “crudity and Red One. Fuller had long been idolized by the so-called “movie illiteracy.” For he is “an authentic American brats”—, , , primitive whose works have to be seen to be understood….It is and the other young directors who had cut their teeth on films like time the cinema followed the other arts in honoring its primitives. Pickup on South Street and Hell and High Water. Meeting Fuller Fuller belongs to the cinema, and not to literature and sociology.” in 1978 Bogdanovich was infected by his enthusiasm for The Big Nicholas Garnham believes that Fuller has much in common with Red One and bought an option. agreed to play the Norman Mailer, and David Thomson finds him both “barbarous” lead and backing was soon found on the strength of his name. and “unique” —”one of the most harsh artistic presences in the When Bogdanovich had to withdraw form the project, Roger cinema,” whose meaning is expressed in his “supremely active Corman’s brother Gene took over as producer. Filming began in style: that every man must be his own protagonist, and that this June 1978 in Israel and Ireland and something like thirty hours of free-for-all morality is exactly mirrored in the larger political film was shot. Fuller cut this to about four and a half hours and arena.” then a long struggle began, with the help of various editors, to A small man with a large cigar rammed into the corner of reduce it to its final 120 minutes. his mouth, Sam Fuller has become a familiar figure in the films of The Big Red One (1980) follows four members of an his avant-garde admirers. He played himself in Godard’s Pierrot infantry platoon and their sergeant (Marvin) from a beachhead le Fou and Luc Moullet’s Brigitte et Brigitte, and appears also in assault in North Africa and then through Sicily, Belgium, and ’s The Last Movie, Spielberg’s 1941, and Wim Germany to their final liberation of a concentration camp in Wenders’ and The way Things Are, among Czechoslovakia and VE Day. The sergeant is a veteran who as a other movies. He has directed for television on occasion and has young doughboy had killed a German at the end of , continued to publish bad novels. Fuller is said to retain an almost after the signing of the Armistice; he does the same thing on the boyish enthusiasm for the cinema—describing a new project to battlefield at the end of World War II. Otherwise there is no plot, potential backers or anyone else who will listen, he “jumps over no wrestling with psychological problems, no flashbacks to desks, does all the parts.” Sam Fuller married Christa Lang as his civilian life. The sole concern of Fuller’s “Four Horsemen” is second wife in 1967. They live in a house full of books on the survival, and they do survive, almost magically, while their Civil War and the American Indian, and busts of Fuller’s idols, comrades die around them, because they learn from their tough among them Beethoven, Mark Twain, Benjamin Franklin, and but compassionate sergeant the secrets of unity, loyalty, and Mergenthaler. discipline. plays Zab, the aspiring “Hemingway of the Bronx,” who represents the young Sam Fuller. from Criterion Collection DVD Pickup on South Street. 2004. A reviewer in the British Monthly Film Bulletin called “Martin Scorsese on Samuel Fuller” The Big Red One “the one great film of the Eighties.” Few would go that far, but many would agree with that it It’s been said that that if you don’t like the Rolling stands with The Big Parade and What Price Glory? “in the great Stones, then you just don’t like rock and roll. By the same token, I tradition of American war dramas.” Shickel found in the film “a think that if you don’t like the films of Sam Fuller, then you just mellowness that contrasts sharply with the brutal force of don’t like cinema. Or at least you don’t understand it. Sure, Sam’s …[Fuller’s] earlier films….The camera is almost always at eye movies are blunt, pulpy, occasionally crude, lacking any sense of level, the shots are allowed to play long and calmly, with few delicacy or subtlety. But those aren’t shortcomings. They are moves and few cuts to close-up.” Some of the incidents—a dying simply reflections of his temperament, his journalistic training, Fuller—PICKUP ON SOUTH STREET—8 and his sense of urgency. His pictures offer a perfect reflection of brains. Sex, religion, politics, or a dripping faucet can make them the man who made them. Every point is underlined, italicized, and go berserk. No one knows when they’ll blow. A good story probes boldfaced, not out of crudity but out of passion. And outrage— why and how they resort to violence, then follows them into some Sam Fuller found a lot to be outraged about in this world of ours. kind of resolution. For the man who made Forty Guns and Underworld USA and If you’re trying to be honest, how can you make a Pickup on South Street and Park Row, there was no time for gangster movie or a western without showing their savage tools of mincing words. There’s a great deal of sophistication in Sam’s trade? How can you tell a story about war without showing the movies, but it’s all at the service of rendering emotion. when you bloody absurdity or warfare? How can you depict gangsters, appreciate a Fuller film, what you’re responding to is cinema at its cowboys, or soldiers motivated by anything other than their will very essence. Motion as emotion. Sam’s pictures move to survive? You can’t, unless you’re . convulsively, violently. Just like life when it’s being lived with Don’t get me wrong, I loved Wayne personally. but he real passion. … became a star because audiences were sold fantasy, which, Sam’s films had a force that blew all the clichés away unfortunately, sells better than fact. Entertaining as they are, those from whatever issues they were dealing with. There are no cheap heroes that Wayne played just didn’t exist in reality. See, one thrills in his work. He was always trying to fathom the thing I hate in Wayne’s war movies is when some officer unfathomable, whether it was a subject as broad as the inhumanity invariably says, “These men have given their lives for their of war or the injustice of racism, or, on more intimate level, the country.” thirst for power or the infectiousness of paranoia.In Sam’s What bullshit! They didn’t give their lives. Their lives movies, there was no difference between the personal and the were taken away. They were robbed. When we signed up for political—both were part of the continuum of human experience. I military service, if somebody had told us from the get-go that we think he was one of the bravest and most profoundly moral artists had to give our lives, nobody would’ve enlisted. We all thought the movies have ever had. That’s why his war films—The Steel we’d make it back to our wives and mothers. Sure, there are Helmet, Fixed Bayonets, China Gate, Merrill’s Marauders and madmen who know in advance they’re going to die, guys like The Big Red One—are the truest, the least sentimental, and the kamikaze pilots, terrorists, or mad bombers. They are usually part toughest I’ve ever seen…. of a lethal fringe that borders on hysteria. The kid finding his fathers body in the alley and vowing I hope one day, maybe in the year 2293, a film student vengeance as he makes a fist in Underworld USA. The unbroken will be analyzing one of my films on a desktop gizmo. He’ll ask tracking shot that follows Gene Evans out into the street as he his professor what’s that funny “thing” the soldier is holding. beats up his opponent in Park Row. The sad, lonely death of “Well, my boy,” the professor will answer, “that was a weapon, in Thelma Ritter’s stoolie in Pickup on South Street. These are those days. They called it a ‘rifle.’ You only see them in museums moments of pure, raw emotion, unlike anything else in movies. I nowadays. We no longer need weapons.” loved Sam Fuller as a filmmaker, and it’s impossible for me to With Park Row under my belt, Zanuck gave me a script imagine my own work without his influence and example. I came called Blaze of Glory, written by Dwight Taylor. Darryl thought to love him equally as a friend. this yarn should be my next Fox movie. I liked the idea. A woman lawyer falls in love with a criminal she’s defending in a murder “Don’t Wave the Flag at Me” Sam Fuller trial. I knew from my newspaper days that courtroom cases take a I hate violence. That has never prevented me from using it in my long time to play out. So I told Darryl that I’d like to do a story films. It’s part of human nature. People have been writing about about an outlaw and his gal, but I wanted to go down a few rungs violence since the Bible. Holy smoke, that’s one helluva violent lower on the ladder of criminality. Why not make the lead a book, a running account of wars, feuds, corruption. and small-time thief, a pickpocket, for example, a wily guy who lives vengeance! Jump ahead a couple thousand years and take a look in the shadow world of petty criminality? Zanuck had his doubts, at Shakespeare’s work. His plays are full of raw, uncamouflaged but he let me go to work on an original script, fleshing out the bloodletting. Children are thrown over castle walls, fathers and main characters and redoing the story my own way. Skip McCoy mothers murdered, throats slit, tongues cut out, heads severed. is the pickpocket, known as a “cannon,” on the street, with a Certainly, all that violence is deplorable, but alas, it’s part of our record of three convictions. Completely antisocial, he’s an brutal heritage. outsider who doesn’t give a damn about the rest of the world. The Our world is still a very new one. We can only trace it only use he has for a newspaper is to conceal his nimble fingers back a few thousand years. Maybe in another couple thousand when he’s grifting a purse. This time, the purse belongs to Candy, years, violence won’t exist in any form.I hope so. Future a good-looking, streetwise dame with a checkered past. My cop’s audiences might watch our movies and wonder how we could called Tiger, the captain of an anti-pickpocket brigade who’s have been so barbaric, just like when we watch gladiator movies trying to put Skip away for life. Moe is an old lady who makes a and shake our heads at those ancient Romans organizing living by selling information, a stoolie whose one goal is to save gruesome spectacles with man-eating lions in packed coliseums. up enough money for a decent cemetery plot. That way, she’ll For cryin’ out loud, that was their show business. the most hated fate of poor people. “If I was to be buried in Like the air we breathe, violence is always there, all Potter’s Field, it’d just about kill me,” says Moe. around us. Animals kill when they’re hungry. Man kills for All over the world, you’ll find small-time crooks like power. And man’s lust for absolute power fosters totalitarian Skip, Candy, and Moe living on the underbelly of society, governments, the most destructive of all goddamned regimes. struggling to survive with their scams, abiding by their own Violence breeds violence. Even a nonviolent person, when unwritten code of ethics. I’d seen plenty of these people firsthand attacked, will kill if he or she has to defend a loved one. when I was a crime reporter. They are individualists, trusting no Inexplicably, some people have a ticking time bomb in their Fuller—PICKUP ON SOUTH STREET—9 one, beyond politics, changes in governments, intellectual labels, food chain but understands the difference between her and Joey’s and fashion. kind of crooks. One night, Moe comes back to her dingy rooming My yarn opens in the New York subway at rush hour. house after a hard day peddling ties and information. She puts a There isn’t a single word of dialogue in the scene. People are French record on her Victrola. Joey comes out of the shadows packed together on the crowded train like sardines. Candy is being with a pistol, putting his dirty shoes up on her clean bed. He’s in a trailed by two FBI agents when Skip masterfully edges closer and rush to get the microfilm back. closer to her and slowly opens her pocketbook, drawing out her My camera panned to the Victrola. As the French ballad purse with his agile fingers. Like a neurosurgeon, his hands are plays on, the scene closes with a violent pistol shot. That ballad his future. Skip doesn’t know that there’s a piece of microfilm in was a popular French tune entitles “Mam’zelle.” I went to see Al Candy’s grifted purse. It contains a new patent for a chemical “Pappy” Newman, the legendary music composer at Fox, to see formula. Joey, her ex-boyfriend and a sonofabitch, is selling the how we could get those rights from . Newman burst out hot item to some Communist spy ring. Candy’s making the laughing. delivery until Skip filches the microfilm without knowing its “That song’s not French!” said Newman. “Edmund value. Joey and the spies will go to any length to recover it. Goulding wrote the song himself for The Razor’s Edge. We Thanks to Moe’s tip, the cops haul Skip in for already own it.” questioning. An FBI agent tries to make Skip cooperate, but he’s Goulding, a veteran director, stopped by my office one contemptuous of all authority. Naturally, he’s only thinking about day during preproduction, happy that I wanted to use his little saving his own skin. Skip’s too marginal and irreverent to fall for song for my picture. A lovely man, Goulding was in the twilight their patriotic appeals. of his career, having made pictures since the twenties with every That night, Candy comes looking for the microfilm at major Hollywood star, notably Greta Garbo in Grand Hotel Skip’s shack on the waterfront. In the dark, he takes a swing at the (1932), Paul Muni in We Are Not ALone (1939), and Bette Davis intruder’s jaw, and coldcocks her. They end up in each other’s in The Great Lie (1941). Goulding told me his secret ambition had arms, kissing passionately. It’s a mercenary kiss. Candy and Skip always been to be a songwriter, so he was delighted for me to use both want something from each other. his tune. It isn’t sex. Neither of them yet knows I was going to call my film Pick- the microfilm’s importance. Candy’s Pocket, and this was years before Robert naïve about politics, but she’s Bresson would make his film with that streetwise. She knows Skip’s not a title in 1959. As we started preproduction, nice guy. She’ll never see him feeding Zanuck called me in for a meeting with birds in the park. He’s too busy some top executives at Fox. They loved scheming his next scam. Yet she’s the project, but not the title. It was too attracted to his no-bullshit style. “European,” whatever the hell that meant. Skip quickly figures out how I argued without prevailing. They asked he can get a bundle for the precious me to come up with another title. I had microfilm, setting himself up for the Cannon in mind, but that would’ve rest of his life. And he isn’t going to conveyed the idea of a war movie. New let Candy botch up the deal. No York’s South Street had a special woman is worth that. He wants memory from my newsboy days, so I nothing to do with women. Home? Family? Love? Useless middle came up with Pickup on South Street. class pipe dreams to Skip. Candy irritates the hell out of him, For my research, I went back to New York and paid a interfering with his work. Everything changes when Candy gets visit to Detective Dan Campion of the NYPD. He gave me plenty beaten up trying to save Skip’s life. Why would anyone risk her of background material to make Pickup look realistic. Campion neck for him? It makes no sense in Skip’s primitive world, where knew every cannon in the city. They knew him, too. One look at sacrifice is laughable. Nevertheless, the seeds of love have been Campion’s face on a subway and any self-respecting pickpocket planted. who wanted to stay out of prison abandoned his prey instantly. All the newspapers at that time in the United States were The captain gave the cannons some rope to exercise their craft, talking about Klaus Fuchs, the spy who operated from England, though you never saw that kind of thing in a movie. When selling secrets on microfilm to the Soviet Union. There was Campion came down on a pickpocket, he came down hard. He’d general paranoia in our country about Communists. Richard been suspended without salary for six months for manhandling a Nixon had just been chosen as the Republican vice presidential suspect. I based Tiger on Campion, making my cop one tough candidate, having made a name with his phony Alger Hiss exposé. sonofabitch, too. But alluding to those cases, I wanted to take a poke at the The movie’s decor came from sketches I drew for Lyle idiocy of the cold war climate of the fifties. Sure, there were Wheeler. The look of Pickup on South Street was primordial. How Communists who believed fervently in Marx and Lenin. But there could you tell a story about petty thieves, informers, and spy rings were also crumbs like Joey who’d go to work for any”ism” if without a realistic portrayal of their dilapidated, predatory world? there was a payoff. People living on the edge of society don’t give The murky bars. The flophouses. The out-of-the-way streets. The a damn about politics. I wanted my film to be told through the tattoo parlors. The subway stations. In the fifties, filmmakers like eyes of the powerless. Cold war paranoia? Hell, these crooks were Roberto Rossellini, Vittorio De Sica, and Luchino Visconti had more interested in just getting by. established a gritty visual style with Rome, Open City (1946), The One of my first casting choices was the great Thelma Bicycle Thief (1948), and Bellissima (1951). They shot their films Ritter as Moe, the stoolie. She is at the bottom of the criminal on city streets, capturing everyday life in postwar Italy. I envied Fuller—PICKUP ON SOUTH STREET—10 their “neorealistic” approach, because I was stuck on the back lot could forget those sparkling eyes and that radiant skin of hers? at Twentieth Century Fox with make-believe streets. I needed the Monroe sat down in a corner and watched us rehearse, never noise, the traffic, the towering buildings, the elevators, the alleys, uttering a sound. After the session was over, Marilyn asked me if the things that make a big city feel like a big city. she could read for the part of Candy. I gave he a script and Lyle Wheeler could work wonders on a Hollywood showed her the scene I wanted her to do. There was something sound stage. I asked him to make Pickup look as natural as childlike about her that you wanted to protect, an innocence that possible. What great work wheeler did for that picture! For was sincere and untainted. After she read for a while, I knew she example he made Skip’s shack on the waterfront look just right. I wasn’t at all what I had in mind for the part. Marilyn didn’t speak, remembered those rickety wooden things built on pilings over the she purred. I told her straight that if she walked long my decrepit water, connected to the shore by wooden bridges oscillating above waterfront, her overwhelming sensuality would obscure my yarn. the river. Two-bit criminals lived down there. They put their beer She was so disappointed. I put my arm around her and said we’d into wooden crates and, with a rope and a pulley, lowered their look for another picture to do together. drinks into the river to keep them cool. My pickpocket lives in When Billy Gordon first proposed Jean Peters for my one of those shacks and chills his beer in the river, too. Except female lead, I didn’t even want to have her read for the part. I’d Skip arranges his booty in cellophane paper and hides it in the seen her in an uninspiring sword-and-dagger picture directed by false bottom of his refrigerator crate, knowing exactly what he’s , Captain from Castille (1947). Then one day I was going to do with every hot item he’s filched. Being on Lyle’s sets having lunch with Henry and actress at the studio for Pickup was like being transported back to the beguiling commissary. Jean Peters came by our table, and I was introduced Manhattan of my journalism days on the Graphic. to her. Jean had just finished her biggest role yet, playing Marlon The sets for the movie were coming together faster than Brando’s wife in Elia Kazan’s Viva Zapata! (1952). She had a the cast. The only actor I ever had in mind to play my lead was lilting voice. As she walked away from us, I looked at Peters’ pert Richard Widmark, who was under contract at Fox then. A born figure and her legs and thought to myself that she had Candy’s individualist, Widmark had a strange face, with that twisted, bowed legs, the kind of gams you get from streetwalking. Peters arrogant smile, that didn’t fit into anybody’s scheme of came to read for me on a Friday afternoon. The sets were all built. Hollywood handsomeness. He walked and talked like nobody We were going to shoot a week from that coming Monday. else, yet there was nothing ostentatious about him, the kind of “So,” said Jan smiling. “I guess I’m the bottom of the man who wouldn’t call too much attention to himself on a barrel.” crowded subway. Widmark was perfect for Skip. “Not at all,” I said. “I just didn’t like those phony gypsies Plenty of actresses approached me about playing Candy. in Captain from Castille.” wanted to do it, but she wasn’t right for the part. “Blame your pal Henry King, not me,” she said. “I’m Ava Gardner was after me to read for it. She was too luscious a just an actress. Besides, that was my first movie.” beauty to be credible. The character’s not sexy enough to be a I loved her spunkiness. We chatted for a long time about hooker, not smart enough to be a housewife. wanted a wide range of subjects, from literature to politics. I found myself the role as long as she got a dance number. For Chrissakes, a talking with a very intelligent woman, a fine human being. Jean dance number! Even if she was one of the highest paid stars in read a scene. I realized she was perfect for the part and told her Hollywood at that time, Grable wasn’t at all right. I needed my she was going to be Candy. Jean asked only that she be accorded Candy to be an average-looking woman, not a glamour-puss. the same rehearsal time as Widmark and Ritter. She knew that she Grable started lobbying Zanuck for the role. We were approaching had to hold her own with two experienced actors. So in the final the production start date, and I still didn’t have the right actress week of preproduction, I came in at dawn and worked with her for the part. every morning from 6 to 10 A.M. We turned our attention to other characters. I’d seen A big car would slowly drive onto the Fox lot and deliver Richard Kiley on a TV drama and liked him to be Joey, the Jean to my bungalow-type office right on time every morning. Communist agent. Kiley played my heavy with just the right While we rehearsed the scenes, Jean’s driver sat behind the wheel amount of paranoid fury. It was hard to believe that in real life, of the car reading newspapers. He always wore sunglasses. I Richard was a devout Catholic, a loving family guy with lots of couldn’t make out his face, but I knew the big guy wasn’t just children. Kiley would later become famous okaying that reading. He was constantly keeping an eye on Jean too. When we marvelous dreamer, my kindred spirit, Don Quijote, in Man of La finished the session, Jean went outside and got into the front seat Mancha. As Moe, Thelma Rotter would give one helluva of the waiting car and the drove away. On the second day of performance, for which she’d receive an Oscar nomination. For rehearsal, it became pretty obvious that the driver was her Tiger, I brought the solid Murvyn Vye out from New York. boyfriend. I asked Jean if she wanted her fellow to come inside and wait for her on the couch in the outer office where he’d be One day, I was rehearsing Widmark and Vye in my office at Fix more comfortable. along with Billy Gordon, our casting director. A good-looking gal “No, no, it’s fine this way,” she said, grinning at me. appeared at the doorway, a scarf over her hair, wearing Widmark came by the last couple of mornings and ran sunglasses, a big sweater, and no makeup. We all looked up. For a through the love scenes with Jean. There she was in Richard’s split second, you couldn’t tell who it was. arms, rehearsing hot embraces and smoldering lines. Jean’s “Can I just sit here and watch you work, Sammy?” said boyfriend observed their make-believe passion from the driver’s , with that breathless voice of hers. “I’ll be as seat of the big car parked outside. It was a little uncomfortable at quiet as a mouse.” first, then we forgot about the situation. One of my secretaries I motioned her in with a wave of my cigar. I’d crossed clued me in. Jean’s driver who never budged from the parked car paths with Monroe at the studio, and we’d become pals. Who was . Hell, one of the richest and most powerful Fuller—PICKUP ON SOUTH STREET—11 men in the world was chauffeuring Jean to my morning rehearsals We started setting up the following scene. Widmark was and keeping a watchful eye on the proceedings. At the time, their caught off guard with my instantaneous acceptance of his refusal romance was top secret. Hughes ended up marrying Peters, the to follow direction. He turned to the script supervisor and asked woman he was so jealously chaperoning. why in the hell would his character zigzag through the police During those last rehearsals, and only a couple of days desks. She explained to him that the pickpocket had been hauled before the picture was to begin shooting, I got an urgent call from into police headquarters so many times before that it was like a Zanuck’s secretary to get over to Darryl’s office on the double. I second home. Skip would have known all those guys. The rushed out. When I got there, Darryl might as well have hit me in zigzagging would have shown his familiarity with the place and the face with a baseball bat. Betty Grable was insisting that she be the people. in my picture, even if she didn’t get to dance. To make matters “You know, Sam,” Richard said as I was preparing the worse, Grable had an option in her contract with Fox that next scene, “that zigzagging stuff sounds pretty good.” stipulated she had to be indemnified if she were turned down for “Too late,” I said. “The set’s struck. We’re in here now. any role she wanted. To refuse her would cost the studio three Let’s move on.” hundred grand. He stood there wordlessly, the smirk wiped off his face. I told Zanuck I wouldn’t do the film without Jean Peters. During the rest of the shoot I rarely had any more trouble with But I was stuck. If I walked, I knew that there were other directors Widmark following my directions. who’d be happy to direct the picture with Grable. Forlornly, I We finished the picture on schedule. When it was went back to my office. I said nothing bout the situation. released it got the full rainbow of reviews. Critics judged Pickup Rehearsals continued. The scenes flowed so naturally with Peters. according to the ax they had to grind. Liberals welcomed the I had the whole film in my head visually with her as Candy. I put movie as outspoken about cold war nonsense. Conservatives the situation with Grable out of my head until a little before six condemned it as pro-Communist. A screening was set up for J. that afternoon. The phone rang. It sounded like a death knell. Edgar Hoover in Washington. He really hated it. Zanuck told me “You’re shooting on Monday,” Zanuck said. “With Hoover called the studio to raise hell about my hero being “anti- Peters.” American.” The pickpocket’s political apathy infuriated Hoover. My heart pumped with joy. I didn’t know how Zanuck However, Skips’s a guy who doesn’t give a shit about the cold arranged it with Grable, but once again, he’d stood by me. I never war. He isn’t letting anything get between him and a big score. mentioned the Grable incident to Jean. She was a pleasure to work The character is true to himself. I didn’t give a damn whether with, exquisite and dedicated, a true professional. Hoover approved or not. I figured that, after Steel Helmet, the FBI When we were already into production, Jean asked me had been keeping a file on me anyway. Pickup would give them one day, “What made you change your mind about me, Sammy?” more material to chew on. “The truth?” I said. One of the movie’s themes is about rushing to judgment. “The truth.” Skip doesn’t condemn Moe when she sells information on him to “Your legs, kid. They’re very sexy. They’re also a little the police. She’s got to earn a buck. Moe reserves judgment on arched. I’m not saying a tank could drive through them. But Candy, despite her questionable past. Candy doesn’t look down maybe a small jeep.” on Skip for picking pockets to make a living. Nobody in this Peters laughed warmly. She was a good sport, easy to milieu is quick to judge others, because everyone is struggling to work with, fun to be around. To shoot those legs the way I survive. wanted, I placed a camera below the rickety bridge to Skip’s The picture was invited to the 1953 Venice Film Festival. shack. Jean walked across it with a little sashay, her hips There the French critic Georges Sadoul, a Stalinist, crucified swinging. My cameraman, Joe ManDonald, innovated to get that Pickup as anti-Communist propaganda. Other lefty critics were shot just the way I wanted. To make other scenes look real, outraged by Pickup, too. There was a resurgent Communist party MacDonald took a helluva lot of risks for me. He shot sequences in France with powerful press ties. The French distributor of the in one single camera movement, not knowing what the hell we film would be so intimidated by all the hullabaloo that, before the had in the can until we’d looked at the dailies. It was the first time film opened in , he retitled my movie as Le Port de la in his career that MacDonald had worked like that and he loved it. drogue—Port of Drugs—changing the French-dubbed version so At first, Richard Widmark was cantankerous and insular, that, instead of microfilm destined for the Communists, the sometimes thoroughly uncooperative. As a star at Fox, he had an pickpocket intercepts a drug shipment. The French not only attitude. I didn’t give a damn about his status. The only thing that tampered with my title but with the movie’s basic story. I was mattered to me was the work. It was inevitable that we’d knock furious. France! Where I thought the artist’s work was revered no heads. The first week of production, we set up the scene when the matter his or her politics. What bullshit! I had no intention of cops bring Skip into Tiger’s office for questioning. I told making a political statement in Pickup, none whatsoever. My yarn Widmark I wanted him to zigzag through the police desks, is a noir thriller about marginal people, nothing more, nothing pausing here and there to comment on a guy’s tie, filch a piece of less. candy, then stroll casually into Tiger’s office. Widmark looked at I didn’t make it to Venice because I was working on Hell me with that superior grin of his. and High Water that summer. Early one morning I was preparing “Why wouldn’t I just breeze straight into the captain’s for a scene on one of Fox’s big sound studios when office?” said Widmark. came up to me on the set with the morning edition of the Los I looked into his face silently, took a puff off my cigar, Angeles Times. and shrugged. I turned to the assistant director and said, ”Strike “You’re on the front page. Sammy,” said Power. the set! Let’s move straight into the captain’s office!” “Congratulations.” “What for?” I asked. Fuller—PICKUP ON SOUTH STREET—12

“Pickup won a prize at Venice.” 6. For women: low necklines, floppy hats, mascara, I grabbed the paper out of Tyrone’s hands and read the lipstick, dressing rooms, boudoirs, calling the doorman by his first article about receiving the festival’s Bronze Lion. I didn’t give a name, high heels, red dresses, elbowlength gloves, mixing drinks, damn about awards. But it thrilled me to learn that the president of having gangsters as boyfriends, having soft spots for alcoholic the Venice jury that year had been Luchino Visconti. I wouldn’t private eyes, wanting a lot of someone else's women, sprawling find out for many years that Visconti had actually opposed my dead on the floor with every limb meticulously arranged and winning the prize because of his own Communist convictions. He every hair in place. was overruled by the other jury members, who thought Pickup 7. For men: fedoras, suits and ties, shabby residential was just a damn good movie. hotels with a neon sign blinking through the window, buying yourself a drink out of the office bottle, cars with running boards, ’s guide to film noir (1995): all-night diners, protecting kids who shouldn't be playing with the Film noir is . . . big guys, being on first-name terms with homicide cops, knowing 1. A French term meaning "black film," or film of the a lot of people whose descriptions end in "ies," such as bookies, night, inspired by the Series Noir, a line of cheap paperbacks that newsies, junkies, alkys, jockeys and cabbies. translated hard-boiled American crime authors and found a 8. Movies either shot in black and white, or feeling like popular audience in France. they were. 2. A movie which at no time misleads you into thinking 9. Relationships in which love is only the final flop card there is going to be a happy ending. in the poker game of death. 3. Locations that reek of the night, of shadows, of alleys, 10. The most American film genre, because no society of the back doors of fancy places, of apartment buildings with a could have created a world so filled with doom, fate, fear and high turnover rate, of taxi drivers and bartenders who have seen it betrayal, unless it were essentially naive and optimistic. all. 4. Cigarettes. Everybody in film noir is always smoking, Noir on the Web: as if to say, "On top of everything else, I've been assigned to get Start with the excellent Wikipedia entry: good: through three packs today." The best smoking movie of all time is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Film_noir) "Out of the Past," in which Robert Mitchum and Kirk Douglas Wikipedia also has a comprehensive list of films noir: smoke furiously at each other. At one point, Mitchum enters a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_film_noir room, Douglas extends a pack and says, "Cigarette?" and The Berkeley library has posted a list (with urls) of eight useful Mitchum, holding up his hand, says, "Smoking." articles about films noir: 5. Women who would just as soon kill you as love you, http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/MRC/Noirtext.html and vice versa.

COMING UP IN BUFFALO FILM SEMINARS XIV: Feb 3 Henri-Georges Clouzot LES DIABOLIQUES 1955 Feb 10 Jack Clayton THE INNOCENTS 1961 Feb 17 Akira Kurosawa HIGH AND LOW/TENGOKU TO JIGOKU 1963 Feb 24 Ján Kadar & Elmar Klos THE SHOP ON MAIN STREET/OBCHOD NA KORZE 1966 March 3 Jean-Pierre Melville LE CERCLE ROUGE 1970 March 17 Robert Altman, THE LONG GOODBYE, 1973 March 24 Andrei Tarkovsky: NOSTALGHIA1983 March 31 Larisa Shepitko THE ASCENT/VOSKHOZHDENIYE 1977 April 7 Warren Beatty REDS 1981 April 14 32 SHORT FILMS ABOUT GLENN GOULD April 21 Pedro Almodóvar ALL ABOUT MY MOTHER/TODO SOBRE MI MADRE 1999

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