In the early twentieth century, the art world was captivated by the
imaginative, totally original paintings of Henri Rousseau, who,
seemingly without formal art training, produced works that
astonished not only the public but great artists such as Pablo
Picasso. Samuel Fuller (1912-1997) is known as the ""Rousseau of
the cinema,"" a mostly ""B"" genre Hollywood moviemaker deeply
admired by ""A"" filmmakers as diverse as Jim Jarmusch, Martin
Scorsese, Francois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, and John Cassavetes,
all of them dazzled by Fuller's wildly idiosyncratic primitivist
style. A high-school dropout who became a New York City tabloid
crime reporter in his teens, Fuller went to Hollywood and made
movies post-World War II that were totally in line with his
exploitative newspaper work: bold, blunt, pulpy, excitable. The
images were as shocking, impolite, and in-your-face as a Weegee
photograph of a gangster bleeding on a sidewalk. Fuller, who made
twenty-three features between 1949 and 1989, is the very definition
of a ""cult"" director, appreciated by those with a certain bent of
subterranean taste, a penchant for what critic Manny Farber
famously labeled as ""termite art."" Here are some of the crazy,
lurid, comic-book titles of his movies: Shock Corridor, The Naked
Kiss, Verboten!, Pickup on South Street. Fuller isn't for
everybody. His fans have to appreciate low-budget genre films,
including westerns and war movies, and make room for some
hard-knuckle, ugly bursts of violence. They also have to make
allowance for lots of broad, crass acting, and scripts (all
Fuller-written) that can be stiff, sometimes campy, often
laboriously didactic. Fuller is for those who love cinema--images
that jump, shout, dance. As he put it in his famous cigar-chomping
cameo, acting in Jean-Luc Godard's Pierrot le fou (1965): ""Film is
like a battleground . . . love, hate, violence, death. In a single
word: emotion."" After directing, Sam Fuller's greatest skill was
conversation. He could talk, talk, talk, from his amazing
experiences fighting in World War II to the time his brother-in-law
dated Marilyn Monroe, and vivid stories about his moviemaking.
Samuel Fuller: Interviews, edited by Gerald Peary, is not only
informative about the filmmaker's career but sheer fun, following
the wild, totally uninhibited stream of Fuller's chatter. He was an
incredible storyteller, and, no matter the interview, he had
stories galore for all sorts of readers, not just academics and
film historians.
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