Sam Fuller

Sam Fuller – Turner Classic Movies showed four films directed by Sam Fuller back-to-back: I shot Jesse James (1949), Park Row (1952), Shock Corridor (1963), and The Naked Kiss (1964). I was very tired and it was the end of a difficult day. My daughter importuned me to let her watch something else midway through I shot Jesse James, Fuller’s first work as a director, and, then, I fell asleep several times during Park Row. I thought that my catnaps might allow me to watch Shock Corridor, but I fell asleep during that film too. The house was warm and humid; scalding heat was on its way. I went to bed before The Naked Kiss began, but, then, couldn’t sleep. Curiously, I was haunted by images from the films that I had tried to watch. I had seen all of these pictures, with the exception of Park Row before, but I didn’t remember them very well. Fuller’s style is emphatic: it is the equivalent of newspaper headlines and exclamation points. He punctuates his mise-en-scene with huge close-ups shot in stark, unflattering light – his characters are tortured, trapped, oozing sweat and despair. Literal newspapers and headlines whirl through the films in declamatory montages. (Fuller, apparently, began his career as a newspaper man and his films seems desperately timely – every shot comes equipped with the sense that it is “ripped from today’s headlines;” this is equally true of his period pictures like Park Row and I Shot Jesse James.) Fuller foreshadows everything. He has a rather conventional notion of narration and tends to be excessively explicit – no one is going to misunderstand his points. It’s a journalist’s ethic to make sure everything is clear, to lead with topic sentences, to start every scene with an image that yanks the viewer’s attention into the sequence. Viewed from a state of semi-delirium, Fuller’s films are nightmarish – Bob Ford has to kill Jesse James every night on stage for his bread and butter; his hand trembles – he can’t bring himself to act the part of the assassin that he really is. Fuller’s images lack chiaroscuro – although his subject matter is similar to film noir, his pictures have an overlit, analytical, circumstantial feeling – here are the facts: everything is visible. Ford has killed Jesse James to earn a reward so he can marry a woman who now despises him as Judas, as a betrayer. In Park Row, an attractive woman dressed in the garments of the late 19th century harasses a man – she obviously desires the man but expresses her admiration and attraction by mistreating him. There is a long essay on the use of forged type and digression on type-setting. Newspapers are printed on butcher-paper, wrapping paper, waste paper. Everyone reads the newspaper which blares with huge headlines. The Statue of Liberty is in fragments, displayed in pieces across a summery-looking Manhattan. In Shock Corridor, a newspaperman pretends to be insane to solve a crime. But, gradually, it seems, that the trauma of his incarceration in the mental asylum has driven him mad. A mob of women try to tear him apart while someone sings “My Bonnie lies over the Ocean” – half catatonic, the man sits with his jaws draped bizarrely in gauze while an inmate serenades him on a guitar. And, slowly, it dawns on us that the inmates of the insane asylum are telling us the stories from other films by Fuller – they seem to be recounting the plots of his earlier movies. The crazy man with the guitar seems to have wandered into the film from Fuller’s Korean war picture The Steel Helmet. A fantasy invokes the Japan of House of Bamboo. On the wall, we see a newspaper article in a frame describing how the Statue of Liberty was transported to Manhattan in pieces and displayed at various locations on the island. And, then, I fell asleep again. But the tabloid kept playing on and on in my head. In I Shot Jesse James, there is a banner displayed: “It’s day all day during daytime / But there is no night in Creede.”