Sam Fuller’s Run of the Arrow
“It’s been said that if you don’t like the Rolling Stones, then, you just don’t like rock and roll. By the same token, I think that if you don’t like the films of Sam Fuller, then you just don’t like cinema. Or, at least, you don’t understand it.”
Martin Scorsese
Ferdinand: “I’ve always want to know exactly what film is?”
Sam Fuller (playing himself): “Film is like a battleground: Love, hate, action, violence, death – in one word: Emotion!”
Pierrot le Fou directed by Jean-Luc Godard
Iconic visuals and cartoon dialogue...
J. Hoberman
1.
A heresy: For some reason I have never been able to warm to Samuel Fuller’s films. Among the Europeans, at least, Sam Fuller is considered one of America’s greatest auteurs, the proprietor of an uniquely kinetic directorial style used to punctuate truths about the United States with the pictorial equivalent of bold-face exclamation points. I think this high regard is based in the fact that English although well understood and grammatically spoken in France, Germany, and Italy is not a native tongue – and for that reason Europeans IMHO (‘in my humble opinion’) are deaf to Fuller’s tin ear when it comes to dialogue: they regard Fuller’s preachy scripts and ridiculous-sounding aphorisms as true to the way that American’s speak – of course, this is sheer imagination and wish fulfilment as well. I can admire Fuller’s propulsive editing and aggressively cartoonish mise-en-scene but whenever a character opens his or her mouth, I wince. There are differing degrees of trash, I suppose, and Fuller, IMHO, represents trash of a high order.
Fuller’s 1957 cowboys and Indians Western, The Run of the Arrow, is one of his best films. I can tolerate this movie better that some of his more pulpy pictures (for instance, Underworld USA and The Naked Kiss) because it is a Western – this means that the dialogue is necessarily stylized to represent the way people spoke a hundred years before the movie was made. Furthermore, on one level, the picture is a war movie. Fuller knew a lot about war. He fought with “the Big Red One” across Europe and into Berlin in World War Two, was shot at and shot Germans himself; many of his buddies died. Therefore, Fuller’s pulp instincts are harnessed to an understanding of the realities of war that he, often, portrays unflinchingly on the screen – Fuller’s best reviewed later film, in fact, is called The Big Red One, and autobiographically represents his experiences in the European theater of war. (American critics judging Fuller’s pictures in real time – and without the influence of the Cahiers du Cinema crowd in Paris – were generally dismissive of his movies.) To the extent that The Run of the Arrow is a war movie, it plays to Fuller’s advantage.
My problems with Fuller may originate in my decidedly middle-brow approach to movies. Fuller’s pictures are very low budget: in Hollywood parlance, they are B pictures. The Run of the Arrow was made when Fuller had supporters in the Hollywood studios and was accorded reasonable budgets. Although not lavish, The Run of the Arrow has several A-list actors and was made with a large enough budget to stage some impressive battle scenes. I’m probably disclosing my middle-brow prejudices but, IMHO, Run of the Arrow just looks better and is more competently acted than many of Fuller’s later films.
2.
Samuel Fuller was born in Massachusetts in 1912. His parents were Jewish (renamed from Rabinowitz after Samuel Fuller, a New England pilgrim who came to America on Mayflower). After his father died when Sam was 12, the family moved to New York City. At age 17, Fuller got a job reporting on the crime and scandal beat for a tabloid, The New York Gazette. (He was a good, tenacious reporter and became well-known in the tabloid community for first breaking the story of the heroin, booze, and chloral hydrate death of a faded silent movie star, Jeanne Eagels.) In addition to his reporting, Fuller wrote pulp novels, at least one of them, The Dark Page picked-up by Hollywood and adapted into a motion picture. Fuller liked writing and said that he would have preferred to stay a reporter but for the money – a director, he said, “makes a thousand dollars an hour.” The names of some of Fuller’s novels, all released in paperback with garish noir covers (half-naked dames in mortal peril), are Burn, Baby, Burn, Test-tube Baby, and Make Up and Kiss.
In 1941, Fuller volunteered for military service in World War One. He fought as an infantryman in North Africa, was in Sicily and at Anzio, and, then, battled his way across Europe to Berlin as a soldier in the Big Red One. (Fuller’s most acclaimed film is his autobiographical picture about his wartime experiences, entitled The Big Red One – Fuller tried to get this movie financed for the better part of 25 years and, finally, shot the movie for release 1982. The Big Red One was a critical success in a two hour version; Fuller had shot a version that was four-and-a-half hours long and, later, released a director’s cut that is 162 minutes in length. The film stars Lee Marvin and Mark Hamill.) Fuller was one of the grunts who liberated the concentration camp at Falkenau where he shot 16 mm. footage later incorporated into a documentary about the place. (Falkenau is at Floessenburg on the Bavarian border with Czechoslovakia.) Fuller was awarded many medals for valor: the Bronze Star, the Silver Star, the Combat Infantryman’s Badge, and the Purple Heart.
Before the War, Fuller wrote scripts for Hollywood. His first script actually produced was for Hat’s Off released in 1936. Upon returning for Europe, Fuller went to Hollywood as a screenwriter and, beginning in 1949, directed films. His first two films were I Shot Jesse James (1949) and The Baron of Arizona (with Vincent Price, 1950). These were low budget pictures: the more expensive of the two, The Baron of Arizona, cost less than $100,000. Fuller’s third film, Steel Helmet, was the first picture made about the Korean War – the War had been raging for only six months when Fuller made the combat picture. The movie was well-received and a critical success. On the strength of this picture, also relatively low budget, Fuller was hired to direct at Fox Studios.
3.
Between 1951 and 1956, Fuller made movies for Fox. He was a studio director, not entrusted with A list movies and stars, but given considerable freedom to make B genre pictures. Fuller was generally successful with the pictures he made at Fox and was granted bigger budgets with respect to his later films for that studio. In 1954, Fox released Fuller’s submarine warfare drama, Hell and High Water with Richard Widmark and Cameron Mitchell. The movie was a box-office success and made a profit. Fuller was, then, sent to Japan to film House of Bamboo, a technicolor cinemascope movie, on location in Tokyo. (Fox was hoping to market the film noir in Japan and internationally.) This 1955 picture starring Robert Stack and Robert Ryan (both, then, A-list stars) was an artistic success but only barely broke even. Nonetheless, Fuller remained in the studio’s good graces and his next film, Tigrero, was slated to star John Wayne. Fuller went to Brazil to scout locations in the Amazon. He shot a considerable amount of location footage, demonstrating an ability to film under difficult circumstances. (This footage can be seen in Mika Kaurasmaki’s 1994 documentary, Tigrero, A Film that was Never Made.) When Fuller returned from the Brazilian rain forests, he learned that production of Tigrero had been indefinitely postponed because of trouble securing sufficient insurance coverage for work in the Amazonian jungle. Fuller, then, jumped ship, giving notice to Fox and briefly agreeing to a contract with Columbia.
Fuller founded his own production company in 1955, Globe Enterprises in which he held a 50% share. Globe, of course, accorded complete artistic freedom to Fuller. Fuller’s Globe Enterprises, then, entered into distribution contracts with Twentieth-Century Fox and Columbia. The two big studios agreed to provide funding for Fuller’s independently made movies. The first, and best funded product of this business arrangement was Run of the Arrow, released in 1957. Run of the Arrow cost one million dollars and starred Rod Steiger, Brian Keith, and Ralph Meeker, a reasonably prestigious cast.
Fuller had written the screenplay a few years earlier and pitched the product to Fox. Fox producers passed on the movie, possibly because of its violence. Fuller next pitched the project to RKO while he was still employed by Fox as a studio director. Fox producers wanted to cast Gary Cooper in the principal role of O’Meara, the unregenerate Confederate soldier. Fuller wanted Rod Steiger, a lesser known star, but one whose stock was rapidly rising after his triumph in On the Waterfront. Fuller said that Steiger’s “bitter face” would be better for the part than the noble, chiseled features of Gary Cooper. Fuller’s cast was reluctantly green-lit by RKO; however, RKO was “on the ropes” at that time and Run of the Arrow was the last picture financed by that studio – ultimately, the film was distributed by Universal on behalf of RKO which was no longer making movies at the time that the picture was released in 1957. (My source for business information as to Run of the Arrow is an excellent book by Lisa Dombrowski in the Wesleyan Film Series, The Films of Sam Fuller: If you die, I’ll kill you! (2008); Dombrowski studied with Jeanine Basinger, a professor of film at Wesleyan University, and the author of a book on Anthony Mann. It is evident to me that Dombrowski’s text represents her Ph.d treatise, repackaged as a book and written under Basinger’s supervision. Also assisting Dombrowski on the book as mentor was the redoubtable David Bordwell at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. Dombrowski’s writing is powerfully influenced by Bordwell’s academic work which includes tallies of average shot length, close scrutiny on a shot-by-shot basis of films under discussion, and a mastery of intricate business aspects of motion film production. In keeping with the tabloid nature of Fuller’s work, Dombrowski’s author portrait poses her as a femme fatale in black cocktail dress with a plunging neckline showing lots of skin.)
4.
In Run of the Arrow, Fuller transposes some events in Red Cloud’s War (the War on the Powder River) from Wyoming and Montana to the desert Southwest. Run of the Arrow was shot in Utah near St. George in the high desert close to Zion National Park and the Virgin River Gorge in Arizona; interiors were shot at Universal Studios in Hollywood – principal photography began in July 1956. As far as the Lakota Sioux lore presented in the movie, the film is, more or less, ethnographically accurate: for instance, the Lakota were divided into Seven Lodges or Councils each independently led and the Lakota religion was monotheistic. The film references the Fetterman Massacre, Red Cloud, and the Treaty of 1868 (also known as the Treaty of Laramie). From information in the film, we can construe the action as occurring between 1866 and 1868 – this makes it plausible that O’Meara would still be riding the Union cavalry horse from which Driscoll was shot on the last day of the Civil War.
The background to the Red Cloud War is slightly relevant to the picture. Prior to the American Civil War, raiding and combat between tribes was endemic to the northern Plains. In 1820, the Lakota (Sioux) retaliated against the Crow for an attack on a hunting party by destroying a large encampment in the Tongue River Massacre. This bloodbath established a condition of permanent enmity between the Crow Indians and the Lakota. (One-hundred years after the massacre, the great Crow leader, Plenty Coups, said that the Tongue River Massacre was the decisive event in Crow history.) In 1830, the Cheyenne, who were traditionally allies of the Lakota, lost their sacred medicine bundle, the magical Sacred Arrows to the Pawnee (who were allies with the Crow). This led to 30 years of intermittent combat between the Pawnee and the Northern Cheyenne in which the Cheyenne desperately sought to regain possession of the Arrows – they fought for them, set ambushes and raids, negotiated with the Pawnee, and, even, tried to buy the arrows back.
In 1863, silver and gold were discovered near what is now Helena in Montana territory. Miners rushed to the gold and silver fields, blazing a trail directly through the contested land claimed by the Lakota, the Northern Cheyenne, and the Arapaho. This trail, a northern extension of the Oregon trail, crossed the bison hunting territory claimed by the Lakota and their allies, although in constant conflict with the Crow and Pawnee. Not surprisingly, the Lakota and their allies began to raid wagon trains moving West on the new road, the Bozeman Trail. The Federal government responded to the raids by building a series of forts along the trail and garrisoning them with cavalry and infantry soldiers. The forts on Lakota territory exacerbated the conflict between the Sioux and the government.
Fighting began in earnest in 1866 when the Oglala war chief, Red Cloud, directed sorties against frontier settlements, wagon trains, and besieged the forts along the Bozeman trail. (Red Cloud was born near modern-day North Platte, Nebraska and was a politically powerful leader of the Oglala council, one of the Lakota Seven Lodges or Councils.) Lieutenant Henry Carrington was assigned the defense of Fort Phil Kearney built near present-day Buffalo, Wyoming in June of 1866. Red Cloud’s warriors besieged the fort for many months. During that siege, Captain William Fetterman commanded a party of 79 men on a raid designed to drive back the Lakota from embattled fort. This occurred on December 21, 1866. Fetterman has been unfairly portrayed as brash and impetuous: he is alleged to have said: Give me 80 men and I will ride through the whole Sioux Nation. Fetterman’s entire command was wiped out by the Lakota in a short affray about two or three miles from the Fort. His troops were decoyed over a nearby ridge by a small party of Lakota led by Crazy Horse, cut off by overwhelming force on a steep hillside, and slaughtered to the last man. (Carrington was initially blamed for the catastrophe and court-martialed; in his testimony, he blamed Fetterman who, of course, could not defend himself, claiming that the cavalry commander had violated his orders by pursuing Crazy Horse’s decoy party. Carrington was a peculiar figure, a professional historian and writer who had attended Yale; his wife was also a professional writer and, after Carrington was acquitted, both of them set to work rehabilitating Carrington’s reputation. They did so at the expense of Fetterman. Recent research casts considerable doubt on the claim that Fetterman arrogantly said he could “ride through the whole Sioux nation with 80 men.” Carrington didn’t mention the boast in his trial testimony during the court martial and the quotation first surfaced in 1904, thirty-eight years after the Fetterman Fight in a book written by Carrington’s second wife, Francis. The Montana Historical Society has published several articles debunking the idea that Fetterman made this boast – see e.g. Shannon Catli’s essay in Montana: The History of the West, Vol. 54:3, Autumn 2004.) The Lakota called the Fetterman fight, the battle of “one-hundred-soldiers in hand”. Before December 1866, Red Cloud consulted a Winkte (“Is like a Woman”), a two-spirit or Lakota homosexual regarded as a powerful prophet. The Winkte said that he had dreamed that one-hundred soldiers in blue uniforms had fallen into his hands – that is, the Lakota had killed 100 federal soldiers. Eighty-one were killed in Fetterman Fight.
The Army was unable to capture the perpetrators of the Fetterman massacre and the Lakota, with their northern Cheyenne allies, proved an elusive and dangerous enemy to the three forts on the Bozeman trail and the wagon trains rolling west to the Montana mining camps. In 1868, government negotiators met with Lakota and Cheyenne leaders at Fort Laramie and negotiated a truce. The Indians had won the war. The government ceded to the Lakota and Cheyenne territories claimed by the Crow and Pawnee. This agreement was contingent on the Indians not harassing the settlers and miners moving west. The three forts along the Bozeman trail, including embattled Fort Phil Kearney, were abandoned and, later, burned by the Indians. The Crow and Pawnee were outraged at the betrayal of their sovereignty, indignation that led to the Crow’s longstanding alliance with the government against the Lakota and Cheyenne throughout the Wars on the High Plains, conflicts that continued for many years, ending only at Wounded Knee Creek in South Dakota in December of 1890.
These events can be glimpsed, although remotely in Fuller’s lurid Run of the Arrow. The Lakota Sioux are at war with the government only a few years after the end of the Civil War. The war involves the road to Montana (the Bozeman Trail) and incursion into Lakota buffalo-hunting territory. The situation is complicated by Indians on both sides of the conflict – in the film Walking Coyote, the Sioux scout, has been working for the government. The humane officer, Captain Clark (played by the incredibly pretty Brian Keith) argues for a negotiated truce or settlement of the conflict before he is killed. In the end, the fort under construction, said to be “Fort Abraham Lincoln” is destroyed by Indian attack and burned to the ground. In effect, the Indians win the war. (Fort Abraham Lincoln is actually near Mandan, North Dakota; it’s the fort from which Custer departed on his way to the Little Big Horn.) The Fetterman Massacre (or Battle of the Hundred in Hands) is directly referenced and Red Cloud appears as a character.
5.
The United States is always at war. After the horrors of the Civil War, a grim internecine conflict, war is generally accounted as an unifying force. In the imagination of movie directors like John Ford, the antagonisms of the Civil War are reconciled by the wars on the high plains against the Indians. This theme is exemplified by Ford’s She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949). The opening shots of Monument Valley are accompanied by a narrative listing battles in the Civil War and ending with the name Appomattox. When the Cheyenne and Arapaho burn the stagecoach station at Sudro’s Well, the officer entrusted with defending the place is mortally wounded. He’s an old Confederate and, as he dies, Ford has the soundtrack play a mournful version of “Dixie.” At the end of the movie, John Wayne, in one of his best performances as the cavalry commander Colonel Brittle, has retired from the service. As he is riding westward into the setting sun, a former confederate races across Monument Valley to stop him. Brittle has just received a commission to be leader of the cavalry scouts. On horseback, he reads the commission and is pleased to see that it is signed by Phil Sheridan, William Tecumseh Sherman, and Ulysses Simpson Grant – of course, all generals who served with distinction in the Civil War. Brittle remarks: “I’m holding three aces here,” referring to the luminaries who have signed his commission. “Shouldn’t you have a ‘full hand’?” the ex-rebel says. Brittle looks at him quizzically. “I mean Robert E. Lee”, the former Confederate soldier says. Ford’s film, the second installment in his famous Cavalry Trilogy (Fort Apache and Rio Grande are the others), is elegiac and almost without discernible plot. Nonetheless, one of the themes of the film, announced by the narrator in the opening sequence, is that the fighting on the Plains in which former Union and Confederate soldier fought side-by-side reconciles enemies in a war against a common foe.
This theme is evident in a number of Western pictures, often with a harder edge. For instance, in Shane, the hot-headed former reb played by Elisha Cook, Jr. makes the mistake of going for his sidearm when taunted by Jack Palance by an insult about Robert E. Lee. The ex-rebel has no chance. Palance’s sinister gunfighter, clad entirely in black, shoots him down, leaving him dead in the mud.
Of course, Fuller’s approach to this subject matter in Run of the Arrow is characteristically tawdry, sadistic, and uncompromising.
6.
In Richard Slotkin’s 1992 book Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in the United States, the author addresses Westerns as a mirror to American political and ideological concerns. Prior to World War II, Hollywood studios made films involving derring-do in the British Empire – the paradigm specimen of this kind of movie is 1939's Gunga Din. These films were popular and made a lot of money. During the Second World War, the War Office was concerned that pictures featuring heroic Englishmen fighting insurgent Muslims and Hindus on the subcontinent would offend Indian where there was a large market for American films and whose assistance as British colonial subjects was required in the Pacific Theater. Accordingly, studios shifted production to large-scale Westerns in which the role of the rebellious Indians on the subcontinent was taken by Native American Indians. Slotkin’s thesis is that American Westerns generally reflect the concerns of the period in which they are made. For instance, Slotkin reads Ford’s cavalry trilogy as allegorically addressing the Korean War with the last film in the series Rio Grande (1950) positing the Rio Grande River (across which the hostiles withdraw) as the Yalu River on the Korean border with China. (There was disagreement among American military analysts as to whether the U.S. should be authorized to pursue Communist forces across that border into China.) Westerns, Slotkin argues, present a means of tranferring “ideological concerns” into the “mythic landscape of the American West.”
In this vein, Run of the Arrow can be seen as a reaction to lingering after-effects of the Civil War in the arena of race relations. The myth of the “lost cause”, the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan (which arose as a response to Griffith’s 1915 Birth of a Nation), the suppression of Black voting rights in the South, and the glorification of the Old South in movies like Gone with the Wind are all grist for Fuller’s mill – and considered in “200 point tabloid” headline fashion in The Run of the Arrow.
7.
On May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court issued Brown v. Board of Education declaring unlawful segregation in public schools. On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a White man on a Montgomery City bus; unrest about segregation led to the Montgomery Bus Boycott in December 1955. Rev. Martin Luther King led the Montgomery Bus Boycott. In April and May 1956, Southern states sued the NAACP and passed laws designating it a criminal organization. Many White people joined White Citizen’s Councils to defend their racial perquisites. In January 1957, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference was convened to promote desegregation. In September 1957, the Little Rock 9 were blocked from entering the Little Rock Central High School. President Eisenhower dispatched Federal troops to Little Rock. In September 1957, President Eisenhower signed the Civil Rights Act of 1957.
Think about Run of the Arrow against its turbulent contemporary background.
8.
Samuel Fuller is a true auteur – that is, he is ultimately the author of all aspects of most of his films. Generally, his movies begin with a credit that says : Written, Produced, and Directed by Sam Fuller. These are not studio productions. They spring entirely from the imagination of Fuller, and, although compromised by low budgets, his movies are the unadulterated results of his creative efforts. A film like Run of the Arrow accordingly reflects Fuller’s intentions, his filmmaking style, and his sensibility. So, it is worth considering the nature of this sensibility.
True to his origins in pulp fiction (dime novels) and the tabloid press, Fuller’s films display various attention-grabbing devices as well as a certain didactic, moralizing tendency. Attention-grabbing filmic devices are the equivalent of large print tabloid headlines; Fuller’s didactic aspects are the equivalent of rabble-rousing editorials in the yellow (tabloid) press.
Consider the beginning of Run of the Arrow: the camera tracks right to left showing the carnage of war, dead soldiers amidst battlefield debris. At first glance, the shot is similar to a lot of mournful establishing shots showing the results of combat. But first impressions with Fuller are, often, misleading. The shot is not purely pictorial but turns out to be motivated by a man riding on the horse, prominently marked with a US brand, that will be central to the picture. The shot is not expressive, but actually a way of reframing, directing the viewer’s attention to Driscoll, the Union officer who is riding the horse and who will seriously wounded by O’Meara in a few seconds. What seems at first an elegiac and tragic image turns out to be a way of precipitating the viewer into the narrative. O’Meara shoots Driscoll with the last bullet fired in the war. (The first bullet fired in the movie, which is the last bullet of the Civil War, turns out to be the last bullet in the movie – the shot that administers the coup de grace to Driscoll at the end of the picture; Fuller’s narratives are usually over-determined and obsessively tidy in construction and this is certainly the case in Run of the Arrow: Driscoll gets shot at the beginning and the end with the same bullet.) O’Meara approaches. There’s a lap dissolve and, now, he is beside his target who lies sprawled on the ground. Fuller tilts the camera so that the horizon is canted. Apparently, Fuller thought the composition of O’Meara squatting beside Driscoll, callously stealing food from the dying man’s pocket, and, then, using his chest as a table for his meal was uninteresting. So, as an attention-grabbing way to energize the frame, he tilts the camera creating an off-balance and expressionistic image.
Several things are worth noticing: Fuller generally leads with a punch to the viewer’s face (sometimes, literally as in The Naked Kiss in which a hooker with a bald head slams her purse right into the camera). He doesn’t take up time with establishing shots, but typically kicks the narrative into high-gear in the first seconds of the movie. The reveal that the tracking shot is actually motivated as a sort of POV of the man on US cavalry horse slowly walking to the left is also a cost-saving measure. A more expensive film would set up tracks and run the tracking shot as an independent establishing image. Fuller wants to minimize the number of camera setups so he economizes by transforming the establishing shot of casualties on a battlefield by reframing without a cut to focus on the man on the horse – the figure whose fate as a victim of O’Meara will motivate the whole movie. If possible, Fuller will use one shot where other directors would employ several camera set-ups. This lets Fuller economize on film and time with respect to repositioning the camera. Of course, Fuller’s use of one shot for a sequence that might ordinarily be composed in several separate shots puts significant stress on his actors – they have to deliver their line readings accurately without falling back on a second or third take and must also hit their marks at the right time for the single shot to work. During this era, most directors would block the scene and, then, film it from a single fixed perspective as a master shot. Then, close-ups would be filmed for insertion into the scene and other details emphasized in separate shots. Fuller doesn’t do this. He shoots a master shot and, if its tolerable, uses the master shot in the film. In many cases, if something is wrong with the master shot, Fuller will optically print the shot with parts of the image enlarged and, then, cut into the master shot to conceal the mistakes and serve as close-ups. On close inspection, the optically printed shots are somewhat more grainy than the master shot and the quality the image will vary within the scene. Fuller doesn’t care about this kind of thing. If the shot is coherent and “reads” for the audience as a vehicle of advancing the narration, he’ll just rely upon a single master shot for the scene.
Some of Fuller’s allegedly expressive innovations are born from necessity. Contemporary critics remarked on how Fuller staged the run of the arrow in the first part of the movie by filming a sequence of shots of feet running – the movie cuts in counterpoint between the running bare feet of the prisoners and running moccasin-clad feet of the Indian pursuer. This was thought to be very clever and imaginative when the movie was first reviewed. French filmmakers, most particularly Robert Bresson, borrowed this effect; in Bresson’s later films like Mouchette and L’Argent, he films people walking from about ankle level – Bresson repeats the effect so much that it becomes irritating. Bresson said that “walking involves feet” and the essence of walking is shown by aiming the camera at the feet. Fuller thought the critics interpretations of the scene were amusingly fanciful. As it happened, Rod Steiger playing O’Meara had sprained his ankle badly and could barely walk let alone run. (Steiger moves with a palpable limp in a couple shots as he and Walking Coyote stroll through the desert before beginning the ordeal of their run.) Fuller shot and edited the scene with the close-ups for running feet intercut with long shots to disguise the fact that Steiger wasn’t in fact running. The effect of the images of the feet traversing the desert is emphasized with an exclamation point, the sudden quick shot of Walking Coyote’s feet ripped and bloody from crossing the rough and cactus overgrown desert terrain. In this case, the effect that critics found impressive was purely incidental to Fuller’s need to improvise and economize on location – he couldn’t delay the shooting although Steiger was incapable of executing the scene; instead, he finds a work-around, substituting a close-up of someone else’s feet for Steiger’s.
Another characteristic of Fuller’s film style is shock cuts between scenes. The battlefield scene at the beginning ends in a relatively sedate way only to be succeeded by a big close-up of a man’s face bawling out a song as he plays banjo. This is the shot of the man on the wagon singing “I’m a good old rebel” (Fuller softens the lyrics which are shocking even today). The sequence in which O’Meara confronts his mother and says that his father and two brothers were killed in battle is staged on a bridge across a little stream. This is a peculiar location for the pivotal scene in which O’Meara announces his undying hatred for the Union Cause and his intent to go West. (The last stanza of “I’m a good old Rebel”announces that the singer intends to re-arm himself, opt out of Reconstruction, and continue the War from Mexico.) One can interpret the staging of the scene on a bridge as signifying that the sequence is transitional, liminal, a pivot that will project the film’s narrative from the South into the West. But, I don’t think this was Fuller’s intent. Again, I think the staging of the scene on the bridge is, more or less, incidental to the director’s desire to create a frame around his actors, to enclose them by the masonry walls that force the characters into a confined space and, thereby, amplifies their antagonism.
As with the tilted frame in opening scenes with O’Meara and Driscoll, the shock cut to the close-up of singing man on the wagon is not intended to be expressive of anything – there’s no deeper meaning in the mise-en-scene beyond Fuller’s desire to startle the audience with the effect. He’s straining to engage the viewer with a shot that is the equivalent of tabloid headline – it’s big, dramatic, and doesn’t have anything to do with the content expressed. The cut is like an exclamation point. An exclamation point isn’t expressive. It simply underlines and accentuates. And this is, generally, the case with Fuller’s more spectacular effects – the shots and editing aren’t about their content; they don’t necessarily mirror their subject in some way; rather, they are simply signs reading: LOOK AT ME! For me, IMHO, this is a flaw in Fuller’s direction: he grabs you by the throat but the gesture doesn’t necessarily mean anything. One could imagine the rendition of “I’m a Good Old Rebel” shot in sinister gloom, with dense chiaroscuro, or, perhaps, the performance could be shot in glaring light against a neutral background; the camera angle could be tilted to reflect the perversity of the song or Fuller could devise an ironic montage to show as a counterpoint to the lyrics. But he doesn’t opt for any expressive way of staging the musical sequence but, instead, just slaps the audience in the face with the shock cut to the singer’s open mouth and his dullard’s face.
The other aspect of Fuller’s tabloid sensibility (“Headless body found in Topless Bar”) is his rather vulgar and simplistic moralizing. Fuller’s films almost always contain a didactic sequence in which one character lectures another (or several) about a topic of social concern. These harangues aren’t profound or subtle in any way – they are simply sermons that endorse status quo opinions. For instance, in The Naked Kiss, Fuller pauses the action to have a crusading District Attorney lecture his minions about the evils of prostitution. The arguments presented in the sermon are simple-minded and superficial – Fuller isn’t concerned with social conditions that make prostitution inevitable; instead, he focuses on the harm to women involved in the trade and the damage that prostitution inflicts on society by undermining the family. In The Naked Kiss, a woman who was an abused prostitute tries to go straight, finds a perfect potential husband, and, then, learns that her prospective groom is a vicious child molester who needs her as a “beard” to cover his predatory conduct. We know the former prostitute is virtuous because she has devoted herself to assisting (extremely cute and photogenic) crippled children in learning how to walk. Consider, Underworld USA: the mob is selling drugs to school kids and recruiting cheerleaders to become prostitutes. The Federal prosecutor, chairman of something called The Crime Commission, pauses the action to harangue his subordinates. Standing in front of a wall of military memorabilia (including a Big Red One banner), he explains that organized crime imitates military command structures: there are generals, captains, lieutenants, and whole platoons of foot soldiers in the mob. (Fuller’s intent here is ambiguous: is he intentionally or, perhaps, inadvertently implying that the military is a criminal organization itself, a structure of command directed toward committing murder?) Shock Corridor, which is Fuller’s masterpiece, is full of lectures although they are all spoken by madmen: there are extensive discussions of the American Civil War, the effects of racism on African-Americans, and the horrors of nuclear war. In The Run of the Arrow, O’Meara and Captain Clarke (Brian Keith) discuss the necessity of patriotism and love of country and the film’s embittered protagonist is compared to Philip Nolan, the “man without a country” in Edward Everett Hale’s famous short story of that same name. Fuller slows the action for Clark to give a precis of the plot of that 1863 story. Fuller’s didacticism shows him to be a typical Jewish liberal from the East Coast. The opinions that he presents in his movies are pedestrian, common place verities: Prostitution is bad and results in the exploitation of women; organized crime is bad, particularly when it targets school kids by peddling dope to them and turning them into whores – in Fuller’s moral universe, drug addiction is worse than murder, on par with child molesting (Shock Corridor and The Naked Kiss) racial discrimination is bad and African-Americans should be allowed full participation in governmental affairs; schools should be integrated (as argued in Shock Corridor); the Ku Klux Klan is bad (as shown in Run of the Arrow and Shock Corridor); patriotism and rational love of country should be encouraged (cf. Run of the Arrow and Shock Corridor).
As I have argued elsewhere, an important and fundamental strain in post-World War II popular art as embodied in the TV and the movies is pedagogical. Films and Tv shows, even sit-coms like The Dick Van Dyke Show and The Andy Griffith Show mobilize their effects to didactic ends: each episode tells a parable about virtue and makes a moral point. Fuller exemplifies this characteristic par excellence, a feature of his art that seems inimical to the director’s adulation by French intelligentsia – as I have also argued the French critics imaginatively misunderstand Fuller and are not aware of his “tin-ear” for pedantic dialogue. (If you don’t know a language as a native speaker, it’s hard to gage defects in tone and diction.) In Run of the Arrow, Clark who is the voice of moral reason in the film says that the “defeat of the South was the birth of a nation”, anachronistically paraphrasing D. W. Griffith whose 1915 film Birth of a Nation inspired both Woodrow Wilson and the Ku Klux Klan. But Fuller also argues that the American project is unfinished, that racism still endures as a legacy of the “Lost Cause” and, as the final title in the film tells us: THE END OF THIS STORY CAN ONLY BE WRITTEN BY YOU.
9.
Fuller made a lot of movies and most of them seem to be pretty bad. However, some of Fuller’s pictures after Run of the Arrow have attained a cult status, particularly Forty Guns from a script Fuller wrote entitled Woman with a Whip, starring Barbara Stanwyck. Run of the Arrow’s disappointing box office performance ham-strung Fuller and he never again worked with A-list stars on a big budget. Fuller made a movie about the “werewolves”, German insurgents who continued fighting after the surrender of Germany. The film is entitled Verboten! (with an exclamation point). The film is important, but, virtually, unknown because it illustrates Fuller’s faith in the redemptive power of moving pictures. The Nazi sympathizers are pacified and atone for their crimes after seeing film footage of concentration camps. This was Fuller’s last movie produced through Globe, the director’s indie production company. It was released in 1959 with another film that has cult status, the noir set in Japan called The Crimson Kimono. Fuller, then, wrote several scripts for TV pilots, mostly Westerns. The Studios were uninterested.
Fuller made the very low-budget Shock Corridor (1963), an astonishing picture that is his masterpiece so far as I am able to judge (IMHO) The Naked Kiss (1964) is startling but less remarkable. Both movies were savaged by the critics and scarcely promoted. (The Naked Kiss had its premiere in Whitefish, Montana.) Shark! (another exclamation point) is Jaws (1975) avant la lettre. The film starred Burt Reynolds and its production was marred by an actual shark attack – a white shark ate Jose Marco, a stunt-diver. Fuller tried to take his name off the credits but this was refused by the promoters. Fuller, then, went to Europe where he spent the rest of his life, primarily in Paris where he had a coterie of admirers. He made a picture for German television’s longstanding series, Tatort (“The Scene of the Crime”) called Dead Pigeon on Beethoven Street (1972). Returning to the United States, he was finally able to accumulate funding necessary to direct The Big Red One, Fuller’s autobiographical picture about his experiences in combat in world War Two. The film was well-received but very poorly distributed and earned only 2.3 million in rentals; the movie cost over 9 million dollars to produce, a small budget for a war picture – Fuller stages the D-Day landing on a beach with fifty men on a battlefield that is 100 yards long. Fuller made one more movie in the United States, the disturbing and rarely seen White Dog (1982). Written with Curtis Hanson (LA Confidential), the movie was described as “Jaws” with paws” or, even more sensationally, as a “racist Jaws with paws.” The picture is about a racist who trains his dog to attack Black people. To promote the movie, Fuller gave interviews with his canine star and, even, interviewed the dog several times for the amusement of publicists. The movie failed at the box office, sinking like stone without a trace. Paramount, the producer, mistaking subject matter for the director’s personal perspective, claimed the movie was racist and it was simply suppressed. Fuller, then, went to Europe where he made two movies in French with French producers. Reportedly, those pictures are inconsequential.
Fuller had a strange “afterlife” in Europe. The darling of European cineastes, Fuller played cameo roles in movies made by leading directors – his talismanic presence as a hommage is noteworthy in Jean-Luc Godard’s landmark Pierrot le Fou (1965); chomping on a stogey, he appears as a gangster in Wim Wenders noir with Dennis Hopper and Bruno Ganz, The American Friend (1977); he is also featured in Wenders The State of Things (1982), a film about a movie crew stranded in Lisbon when money runs out. Fuller plays Joe, the cameraman on the location:
Mark: You know I take pictures, photographs but I never really thought in black and white before I saw our rushes. Do you know what I mean? You can see the shape of things.
Joe (Fuller): Life is in color but black and white is more realistic.
In Wender’s script, Fuller is quoting the great French photographer, Henri Alekhan
Fuller lived in France until 1994 when he suffered a stroke. With his wife, he lived in a small apartment in the 12th Arrondisement. Fuller returned to Los Angeles and died in Hollywood in October 1997 at 85 years age.
