Sam Fuller has always been Hollywood's bad boy. A director with a wide streak of independence, strangely contradictory politics and a pugnacious visual style, he has often been described as a cinematic primitive. Fuller worked as a newspaperman and a crime reporter for many years before turning in the late 1930s to screenwriting. (Even after he began directing, Fuller continued to write most of his own scripts.) During WWII he enlisted in the army, serving with the First Infantry Division throughout the European theater, earning numerous decorations. Fuller's experiences in the newsroom and on the front lines would mold his film work.
Fuller's first film as a director was "I Shot Jesse James" (1949), a low-budget reworking of the James legend concentrating on Bob Ford, the bandit's murderer, and characterized by a startling use of closeups. However, the fundamentally dull cast and lack of action hinder the overall effect. The film did well enough to establish Fuller and was followed by an intriguing oddity based on the true story of a man who tried to prove that he owned practically an entire state, in effect making himself, "The Baron of Arizona" (1950). His first war film, "The Steel Helmet" (1951), was rushed into production to capitalize on the outbreak of hostilities in Korea, and became his first box-office hit. It was succeeded by "Fixed Bayonets" (also 1951), another gritty Korean War film about a corporal forced to take command of a rear guard action as his superiors are killed off. "Park Row" (1952), a period newspaper story, was a successful blend of history, action, and romance.
"Pickup on South Street" (1953) remains Fuller's best film. Richard Widmark stars as a pickpocket who accidentally steals a roll of microfilm intended for communist agents. He soon finds himself caught between the FBI and the communists before finally shirking off his cynicism to help defeat the foreign agents. The film features numerous Fuller touches: a shrill anti-Communist line, a protagonist who is a borderline psychopath, "film noir" sensibilities, bursts of graphic violence, unapologetic sentimentality, and fluid, almost athletic, camerawork. It also benefits from a more polished look than many of his previous, independently produced films.
Fuller's concern with identity, whether racial or national, is the underlying focus of many of his films. His sympathetic treatment of Indians in "Run of the Arrow", the Eurasian heroine in "China Gate" (both 1957), and the Japanese-American cop in "The Crimson Kimono" (1959) seem at odds with his anti-Communist, gung-ho American attitudes. Yet such treatments are fully in keeping with Fuller's respect for the myth of the great American melting pot. Such thematic concerns, however, are always secondary to Fuller's primary impulse as a storyteller with pulp sensibilities. This trait is best displayed in such primal melodramas as "Forty Guns" (1957), a horse opera in the truest sense of the term, with Barbara Stanwyck as a black-clad woman with a whip, and in the crime expose "Underworld U.S.A." (1961).
Fuller's tabloid style was most evident in "Shock Corridor" (1963) and "The Naked Kiss" (1964). Revealing a darker take on American life, the former followed a self-serving reporter who has himself confined to an asylum to uncover a murder so he can win the Pulitzer Prize. The asylum is revealed as a microcosm of contemporary society, and the reporter is eventually sucked into its maelstrom, losing his mind. In "The Naked Kiss," a reformed prostitute moves to a small town to take a job working with hospitalized children. She becomes engaged to one of the community's leading citizens, only to discover that he is a child molester. In both movies Fuller plays the cinematic bully, confronting us with unpleasant characters and situations--and yet both films are oddly compelling. Critics most often split on Fuller over these films, one camp hailing him as an unpolished genius, the other dubbing him a sensationalist hack.
With the exception of "The Big Red One" (1980), an episodic paean to his WWII squadron, Fuller's output since the mid-1960s has been uneven, sporadic, and in some cases virtually unreleased. The bizarre detective saga, "Dead Pigeon on Beethoven Street" (1972), has its champions, but Fuller's most controversial film, "White Dog", was made in 1982 yet remained unreleased until 1991 due to undeserved charges of racism in its story of a dog trained to attack Black people. Fuller had aimed, rather, to make a film critical of racism but, as was typical of much of his work, "White Dog" was misunderstood by many and consequently overrated by those few who got to see it. During these leaner years Fuller has made several films in France and has taken cameo roles in a number of films, notably as an American film director in Paris in Jean-Luc Godard's "Pierrot le fou" (1965), a gangster in Wim Wenders' "The American Friend" (1977), an aged cinematographer in Wenders' "The State of Things" (1982) and as Gabriel Byrne's father in "The End of Violence" (1997).