“I think that if you don’t like the films of Samuel Fuller, then you just don’t like cinema. Or at least you don’t understand it,” Martin Scorsese once stated. Check the Fuller cycle at Cinematek before you accuse Marty of exaggeration.
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Samuel Fuller has never had masses of fans. The American director who died in 1997 was a maverick who went his own way; a way that rarely coalesced with those of the American film studios, the snobbish and preachy press, and the general public. But the throng of admirers that the cinéaste maudit does have is prepared to go through fire and water for him. Martin Scorsese, Jim Jarmusch, Quentin Tarantino, Dennis Hopper, François Truffaut, and Jean-Luc Godard are just a few examples.
Fuller disguised nothing, and pursued brutal, ugly reality with journalistic passion. He would tell stories with the enthusiasm of someone who preferred to shake his viewers up than to leave them feeling indifferent, and with the stubbornness of an artist who valued vitality more highly than academism.
Fuller had already lived two lives before he debuted at age 36 with I Shot Jesse James in 1948. As a teenager, he worked his way up from a paper boy to a crime reporter. He experienced the horrors and absurdity of World War II as a member of the First Infantry Division of the American army, the Big Red One. It marked him for life.
Fuller directed many war films that completely broke with the American tradition of propaganda and heroism. His most famous film, his magnum opus, is The Big Red One starring Lee Marvin as a rock-hard, merciless sergeant who commands four young soldiers during the recapture of Omaha Beach, battles in Belgium and Germany, and the discovery of the concentration camps.
If, after watching The Big Red One, you are hungry for more incredibly violent, jet-black, but lively cinema, you can go to Cinematek almost every day for a new dose of Fuller. Some of his absolutely brilliant films include the Cold War thriller Pickup on South Street, the blistering western Forty Guns, the cult classic Shock Corridor, and the subversive melo-noir The Naked Kiss.
SAMUEL FULLER > 31/7, Cinematek
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