Sam Fuller and Run of the Arrow (film group essay)

 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.  

                                                                                                  

Shock Corridor

 Shock Corridor (1963) "produced, written, and directed by Samuel Fuller" as the credit assures us is this director maudit's masterpiece.  The film is astonishing and you should seek it out.  I'm not an enthusiast as to most of Fuller's movies -- they are tawdry, often poorly written, cartoonish, and visually undistinguished, although his films all contain interesting sequences in which sensationalist exploitation achieves a sort of flamboyant and campy majesty.  That said, most of Fuller's movies are afflicted with long stretches of expository scenes that are as flatly lit and unimaginatively staged as an episode of I Love Lucy.  Fuller's feature made right after Shock Corridor, The Naked Kiss (1964) although highly acclaimed by some critics is tedious with poorly written dialogue and excursions into maudlin and ridiculous sentimentality.  The Naked Kiss has a certain sophomoric cynicism -- poor prostitute goes straight only to discover that her fiancee is a child molester -- a surprising plot twist because inadequately motivated; this plot development feels like a trick on the viewer.  Shock Corridor is a horse of a different color, crazily inventive and gripping from first shot to last.  In Shock Corridor, Fuller's unique sensibility is harnessed to an excellent script and brilliant black and white camerawork by Stanley Cortez that completely transcends the schlock elements of the story -- here Fuller's sensationalism fuses perfectly with his camera effects and bizarre dialogue to produce a film about madness that is, itself, convincingly insane.  Further, Fuller's sermonizing, which is a flaw in many of his pictures, is penetrating and, even, profound as a diagnostic of certain social problems that the movie addresses.  Shock Corridor is a tour of Fuller's earlier films and obsessions; it's an account of American history as a febrile story of psychic pathology and madness. 

Fuller's movies, generally, begin with a figurative punch in the nose -- the audience gets slugged not because this has anything to do with the story but as a way of Fuller getting your full attention.  In Shock Corridor, a sweaty-looking psycho is babbling about how he loves stroking and caressing his sister's long hair.  The nut-case is about to pronounce himself a "sexual fetishist" but his Asian shrink discourages him from using the word "fetishist".  "It's a give away," the malign-looking shrink says.  Thus, we learn that the crazy guy, Johnny Barrett, is only feigning madness -- he's being coached on how to deceive a psychiatrist into thinking he's a hair fetishist with a desire to rape his own sister.  Barrett's girlfriend, a stripper in some sort weird semi-expressionist venue, has been recruited to play the madman's sister.  Barrett is a journalist afflicted himself with an idee fixe -- he wants to win the Pulitzer Prize by solving the case of a murder that took place in the locked ward of a local insane asylum.  His plan?  He will get himself arrested as a sexual pervert and committed to the closed ward and there he will investigate the killing and publish a newspaper article about what he discovers.  The stripper girlfriend, who Fuller films performing her act (she wiggles her ass and shimmies her tits and is such an untalented dancer that she looks like an idiot), opposes the idea as being too dangerous and degrading as well.  But Barrett and his editor and the shrink (Dr. Fong), persuade her to go along with the idea that is, itself, evidence of the hero's madness.  What could possibly go wrong?

Barrett pitches a fit when cops come arrest him on the complaint of his alleged "sister" (the ecdysiast girlfriend) -- she has gone to the police and, essentially, accused her boyfriend of raping her.  Barrett gets committed and finds himself in a scary, closed ward with brutal attendants and sinister orderlies.  There's Pagliacci, a huge fat man who tunelessly sings opera arias and crouches over Barrett as if buggering him.   Pagliacci tortured his wife to death by stabbing her as he regaled the dying woman with his off-key opera singing.  Another guy thinks he's Jeb Stewart, the Confederate general, who is constantly studying the battle of Gettysburg to figure out how to win the fight with Pickett's charge.  Jeb Stewart is a casual racist who responds enthusiastically to Barrett's claim that he is, himself, General Nathan Bedford Forrest, the Confederate officer who founded the Ku Klux Klan (Fuller gives us a learned disquisition as to the meaning of that name.)  The two whack-jobs salute one another.  After some probing, Barrett discovers that the victim of the crime, Sloan, was killed in the kitchen with a butcher knife and that three mad men witnessed the crime committed by a sadistic orderly.  One of the witnesses is presented marching behind a sign that says something to the effect that "Desegregation of Higher Education" is evil and that all "niggers should "go home."  When the man lowers the sign covering his face, we see that the madman protesting desegregation is, in fact, a handsome Black man who was driven mad by hatred of racist students and staff when he became the first African-American to matriculate into a previously segregated Southern college.  The Black Man attacks another dignified old African American gent crying out:  "Get him before he marries your daughter!"  We find out that Jeb Stewart became insane when he was captured by the North Korean commies and forced to become a Red himself.  Another mad man, Bodon was a great theoretical physicist, seemingly driven crazy by his complicity in producing the atomic bomb -- "he now has the mind of a six-years old", an orderly says. (Each madman is given in soliloquy, a sort of operatic mad scene in which they can expostulate on their insanity and it's causes.)  You can predict how this story will turn out, but Fuller's commitment to the nonsensical plot is "go for broke," relentless and utterly unconditional -- the director seems as mad as his characters.  Visually, the film is spectacular:  the stripper in her tight garments (my wife noticed that her crotch is clearly delineated in the form-fitting culottes) appears as a tiny figure, cartoonishly perched on Barrett's shoulder, more or less, and whispering sweet nothings in his ear; shadows gesture and posture, and there's a full-blown thunderstorm in the "shock corridor" -- they call it "the street" -- complete with lightning strikes and water pouring down from the ceiling.  The madmen howl and bay like dogs and there are fights over food and a full-blown race riot triggered by the African-American who hates "niggers."  In one scene that has to be seen to be believed Barrett flees an assault by entering a door that leads him directly into the clutches of the "Nymphos".  The "Nymphos", who are like Bacchae, hurl him to the ground and start eating him.  There's hydrotherapy, savage fights, and electro-shock treatment.  

In the film, Fuller seems to be touring his previous movies and alluding to the more garish aspects of those productions.  The poor Confederate soldier reminds us of the embittered O'Meara in Run of the Arrow and there are many references to the Big Red One, that is, Fuller's infantry unit that fought its way from North Africa to Sicily and Italy and, then, across Europe to Berlin.  The movie grows in interest the more you know about Fuller and parts of it might be baffling if you don't have some sense for the director's other, earlier movies.  But, even without that knowledge, this picture is stunning and something that you must see.     

Solo Sunny

There is a genre of films that fall into the category of "crazy bitch" chronicles.  I have recently seen a French picture of this description, Let the Sunshine In directed by Claire Denis.  Solo Sunny (1979) is worthy example of this kind of film, albeit with a German inflection.  An early example of this sort of movies, and, perhaps, the grandmother of modern films in this genre is Truffaut's The Story of Adele H.  Films of this species follow closely the adventures and misadventures of a heroine who has, sadly, something seriously wrong with her.  Generally, the female protagonist is beautiful, intelligent, and ambitious, but she has awful taste in men, invariably selects abusive partners, and ends up lonely, delusional, and solitary.  In some cases, the heroine's sorrows can be attributed to the patriarchy; however, more likely than not, there's an obstinate strain of mental illness at work in "crazy bitch" pictures.  Movies of this sort, often, begin in comedy and end in tears.  The genre deserves more consistent and coherent study, but I'm certain it exists and films belonging to this category share certain characteristics.

Take Solo Sunny for example:  in one scene, the heroine, Sunny, confronts her boyfriend Ralph about his unfaithfulness.  Ralph is a hunky "philosopher" of sorts.  Sunny comes to his tiny, dim-lit apartment (it's walled with old books) and gets into his narrow and uncomfortable bed with him.  (The people in Solo Sunny make love in cramped, uncomfortable beds or on the crack between two single beds that have been pushed together.)  In the morning, Ralph is awake and has an alarmed look on his face.  He wakes Sunny by speaking to her:   "Why is there a knife in this bed between us?"  Sunny is cheerfully unconcerned:  "I put it there."  "But why?" Ralph asks.  "Because I was going to kill you," the crazy ex-girlfriend says.  "Why didn't you?" Ralph responds.  "Because I fell asleep," Sunny says.  "So if you hadn't fallen asleep, I would be dead?"  "That's right," Sunny responds.  Ralph plucks the knife out of the sheets and carries it to the kitchen,  It's a foot-long butcher knife with a gleaming blade.  This is a paradigm for the "crazy bitch" genre.

Sunny is an orphan, now about 30 years old, who sings in a band called "The Tornados".  The Tornados are like the airport Holiday Inn band from Hell.  They are scarcely proficient and play soft rock and toothless funk to audiences comprised mainly of geezers.  (The Tornados actually tour a circuit of geriatric homes as part of their endless road trip through cheerless East German towns.)  The film was made in the waning days of the DDR (Communist East Germany) and the band seems to be state-subsidized, part of an attempt to entertain the dour and miserable citizens of the Worker's Utopia.  There's a smarmy emcee who looks like a character from an Indiana roadshow of Cabaret and a couple of variety acts that share the stage with the Tornados, a male and female couple of acrobats, and several dancers.  Sunny is the show's chanteuse.  Sexual harassment isn't a "thing" thought to be unseemly in the old DDR and Sunny's fellow performers mercilessly grope and proposition her.  She's attractive in a waif-like manner, slender and blonde, a German version of one of the "birds" in Swingin' London who looks a bit like a meatier Twiggy.  She seems to have randomly slept with some of the band members but this isn't clear -- in any event, there is some sort of pheromone that she exudes that causes the sulky and profoundly unattractive men around her to constantly harass her.  (East Germans were not a pretty people -- the men all wear leisure suits and tight jeans and have dowdy little moustaches like American porn stars of the seventies.  The women are generally drab and dress like hookers or charwomen.)  Sunny has an earnest admirer, a taxi-cab driver who fancies himself a wealthy man and an entrepreneur in the German Worker's Republic.  He seems like a reasonable guy but he also has an ugly little moustache and a receding chin and bulbous face -- the sort of doughy features that most people in the movie display.  The man is slavishly loyal to Sunny but she won't give him the time of day.  

Sunny lives four days of the week in a hideous apartment with a toilet one-and-a-half stories below her quarters.  Her neighbors are censorious and, this being East Germany, everyone is constantly informing on everyone else.  The complaints aren't political -- the movie isn't bold or honest enough to depict informants ratting each other out to the STASI -- but rather that Sunny "entertains" men in her rooms,     insults fellow tenants, tolerates messy pigeons on her window sill, and other matters of that sort.  (In one funny scene we see a harried boy-cop confronting Sunny about these complaints in an office with a picture of a growling bulldog of a commissar on the wall.  He doesn't know how to respond, but, obviously would like to make a date with her.  Sunny says she will make a counter-complaint about the old people in her apartment building, but doesn't have any paper -- she has to ask the cop for a sheet of paper on which to write her complaint.)  At her apartment while climbing the purgatorial stairs up to her apartment that opens in Berlin style into a nasty-looking central courtyard, Sunny gets revenge by treading on the fingers of the chief complainant, an old hag, who is cleaning the stairs on her hands and knees.  Sunny tours with the show on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday.  The tours are horrible:  senior citizen centers, tiny union halls, county fairs and there are no decent lodgings for the company.  In one scene, Sunny is staying with a couple of the female performers in what appears to be a dormitory of some sort of asylum -- the beds are stark contraptions made of pipes.  One of her male bandmates won't take "no" for an answer and tries to rape her.  Sunny beats the guy over a head with a metal object, maybe a clothes iron or something.   The other women shout at them to be quiet so that they can sleep.  Later, Sunny is insulted by the emcee before appearing at  a fair and she takes umbrage walking off the stage.  The guy who tried to rape her has found a new, dumpy girlfriend who he promotes into Sunny's role as the singer for the band.  Fired without notice, Sunny takes the train to either Berlin or Leipzig (I wasn't able to figure out the movie's geography) where she has a boyfriend, Ralph, a "philosopher" and sax player.  Ralph doesn't expect Sunny and is entertaining another naked girl in his grim, tiny apartment.  Sunny is enraged and she dumps out the window the bottle of cheap government-issue whiskey that she bought for the man.  The naked girl doesn't much care about covering her nudity but doesn't want to leave the bottle and tries to retrieve it.  Ralph cries out "You're crazy!" to Sunny.  Sunny loves Ralph and has spent many nights with him and, in fact, offered to bear his children -- a proposition that seems to terrify Ralph.  Ralph is a "certified Philospher" which means he has an "Ausweis" (I think this means "diploma"in this context.)  Ralph is the only character who seems even remotely socialist or communist -- he writes opinion pieces for a newspaper and says that many workers had to sacrifice for him to achieve his education which doesn't seem to be helping out the workers much at all.  Ralph has written an English-language pop song for Sunny which is actually pretty good.  (The song in variations is played repeatedly on the soundtrack and it's catchy.)  Sunny performs the song at a solo gig at a Berlin cabaret.  While she sings people eat, drink, carouse, and basically ignore her.  Sunny, then, abandons the music business and goes back to some kind of task that she previously performed at a local factory.  But she quits the job and, then, attempts suicide with sleeping pills.  She survives.  In the final scene, Sunny traipses into some abandoned tenement buildings in Kreuzberg where a band is squatting.  The band is rehearsing in the snowy courtyard.  Sunny confronts them, announces that she will sleep with anyone she wants, and offers to sing with the band.  If anything, they are even worse than the Tornados.  The camera tracks upward into the gloomy sky and we see the dingy buildings of East Berlin.  

I liked this movie a lot.  The heroine is spunky, half-crazed, and appealing.  The miserable landscapes of East Germany are a fascinating spectacle.  Everyone looks downtrodden and unhappy.  The movie was made during the last decade of the oppressive Communist regime in East Germany and seems refreshingly apolitical.  In fact, if anything the film probably makes life in the DDR look worse than it was.  The drinks are all watered and the food looks awful -- at one point, Sunny gnaws on a "Wurst" as if it were as hard as a dog bone.  The film is consistently inventive visually; the editing is disjunctive and elliptical and the camera work is extremely expressive.  The movie's somewhat aimless plot and its depressing elements are more than offset by the picture's striking camerawork.  The movie has been recently restored by the German government and it looks great.  The film was directed by Konrad Wolf, one of the DDR's most important filmmakers and he is, indeed, an auteur with an eye for striking images and a good touch with actors.  Solo Sunny was the last big box office hit made by the State Studios in  Babelsburg and it was also extremely popular with audiences in West Germany as well -- the picture made money and was a prestige export for the failing Communist regime.  East German movies are hard to see in this country, but, it seems, that MUBI has a tranche of them and will be showing them in the next couple months.    

I

The Edge

 I saw The Edge (1997) on cable about 30 years ago.  The movie is simple the point of being archetypal.  Over the years, I haven't recalled much of its plot (there isn't much, in truth, to remember), but some of the film's lines have stuck with me and, even, become axioms that I often quote.  At one point, the hero bucks up his hopeless comrade by telling him:  "What one man can do, another man can do."  At the climax, the bad guy aims a gun at the hero and tells him that "life is full of betrayals.  You're best out of it."  Someone provides the edifying advice:  "Don't ever feel sorry for a man with an airplane." There is a bit in the script about making fire from ice -- it has to do with molding snow into a lens like a magnifying glass and, then, focusing the lens on kindling on a sunny day.  (I seriously doubt if this would work, but I, certainly, hope so and have brooded about this wilderness survival trick for about half my life.)  Whenever I am lost and don't know my way, I recall the hero's admonition to his fellow castaways:  "Most people who get lost in the wilderness, die.  And you know what they die of:  shame.  Instead of thinking, they keep asking themselves 'how did I get myself into this problem?' and 'Why is this happening to me?' until, in the end, they just give up and die."  The last line in the movie, which is a lie, is the greatest and most simple:  "How did the other (castaways) die?"  "They died...saving my life."

The Edge directed by the New Zealand Maori film-maker, Lee Tamahori, represents that director at the beginning of his career, right after his breakthrough movie about the Maori people Once were Warriors (1994)  Great things were expected of Tamahori, but he was seduced by Hollywood, ended up making a series of movies that were, apparently, each successively worse and more formulaic and never, it seemed, reached his full potential.  That said, his first two movies are masterpieces of a kind and well worth seeking out.  (It may be that his last picture The Convert, shot in New Zealand in the Maori community, may be similarly powerful and a return to Tamahori's roots:  I don't know I haven't seen this movie released in 2023 and it is hard to find.

The Edge is a standard issue wilderness adventure movie.  Its premise is crude and predictable:  three men find themselves alone in the Alaskan (or Canadian) wilderness.  (The awe-inspiring visuals were shot around Banff and the Columbia ice field.) The protagonists are a smarmy fashion photographer (Bob, played by Alec Baldwin), his African-American assistant, and a billionaire, acted in a restrained manner by Anthony Hopkins.  The men have taken a plane north to a small lake in the hope of meeting an authentic trapper and Native American, a man named Jack Hawk.  Bob wants to incorporate Hawk's rugged features into his fashion shoot which involves the billionaire's trophy wife Elly, played by the actual fashion model Elle MacPherson.  On the way to a remote lake which turns out to be different from the destination they announced back at the base camp at a luxury lodge, the single engine Cessna hits a flock of birds and crashes into an icy body of water between snowcapped peaks.  The pilot drowns but the three men escape relatively uninjured.  They set off to walk back to Jack Hawk's cabin where they expect search parties will be looking for them.  But there are rushing rivers to cross and an enormous bear that decides to hunt them down as prey.  That's the situation and, in fact, the plot of the movie.

What redeems this formulaic "lost in the wilderness" film are several factors.  First, there is the awe-inspiring landscapes against which our trios travails are filmed.  The movie is beautiful and the snow and cold and rain are palpable.  Second, the film inverts our expectations -- the billionaire turns out to be courageous, resourceful, and, even, virtuous.  Hopkins plays the part superbly projecting quiet, eccentric confidence and his acting is the center of the movie.  Third, the movie involves a subplot, also very much a formula:  the smarmy fashion photographer played by the smirking Alec Baldwin is sleeping with the fashion model married to the billionaire and Baldwin, playing a deep-dyed villain, is plotting to kill the rich man.  (Baldwin is spectacularly loathsome, but he also displays a real gift for sardonic comedy and one can see the appeal that led him to comic roles on Saturday Night Live and, of course, 30 Rock where he was very funny -- he has a gift for mimicry and is excellent at imitating a fey, lisping homosexual (at one point, he accuses Hopkins' billionaire of "latent homosexuality").  Fourth, the film is written by David Mamet and the lean muscular aphorisms punctuating the script are the highlights of the movie and the aspect of the picture that I have recalled for 30 years.  Viewed in retrospect some elements of Mamet's latter-day support for Donald Trump and the author's right-wing Republicanism are visible in the movie's adoring stance with respect to the billionaire, described by his unfaithful wife "as a most excellent man." The last reason to seek out this movie is the spectacular performance by the bruin thespian, Bart the Bear.  Bart was a ten-foot tall 1500 pound brown Kodiak bear and, with Rin Tin Tin, he was one of the best animal actors to ever appear in films.  Bart, who was easy-going and gentle, provides a truly fearsome performance as the movie's vicious animal villain.  Hopkins has said that he spent hours observing Bart's acting chops on the set and learned a lot of things from the bear whom he "respected as a fellow actor."  Bart died in 2000 at 23 in Heber City, Utah.  

Underworld USA

 Somewhere in the recesses of this Blog, there is probably a previous note about Sam Fuller's Underworld USA.  After about thirty minutes, I realized that I had seen the movie before -- I recognized a swimming pool on top of a building that a mob boss was using to front his criminal enterprises; the natatorium sponsored a swimming club for disadvantaged youth and hosted swim meets as the plump, vicious gangster spent his afternoons lounging around the pool with his henchmen.  I didn't remember the rest of the movie until a startling sequence in its last five minutes, but I often focus on decor and locations and the exotic detail of the rooftop pool in a squat skyscraper with a sign over its entry:  Normal Industries (or something of that sort) was memorable to me.  I haven't consulted my previous entry, if it even exists -- forward! is my motto and I'm not interested in what I have done or written in the past.

 Fuller's 1961 release is a complicated revenge story bound up by some peculiar (likely studio-imposed) parameters:  apparently, officials, as late as 1961, frowned on plots in which the hero is allowed to escape scot-free (or even awarded) after committing crimes.  In Underworld USA, the movie devises every possible contrivance to keep its hero, who is certainly murderous and violent, from actually killing anyone.  Sure, he figures out ways to get bad guys killed but never, until the last sequence, delivers the coup de grace himself.  This is a tricky proposition since the film involves a number of gruesome deaths.  Tolly Devlin (played by Cliff Roberstson) is small-time, penny-ante thug.  We see him rolling drunks when he is 14 on New Year's Eve.  Fuller likes to begin his movies with flair and the opening sequence involving a staggering drunk, people singing Auld Lang Syne off-screen, and a savage beating enacted by shadows on a wall, is an impressive piece of filmmaking.  But pretty soon, Fuller slips into the film's rhythm which is mostly overlit, interiors in which people talk to one another after the manner of TV series in the late fifties and early sixties.  After rolling the drunk and snatching his wristwatch and wallet, young Tolly gets assaulted by another even more vicious hoodlum who tries to gouge out his eye with a broken bottle.   This attack leaves Tolly scarred around his eye and, therefore, lets us identify him when he has grown up to be Cliff Robertson.  The guy getting beaten to death in the alley is Tolly's old man, also a career criminal who is killed by four thugs.  The plot of the movie is Tolly finding faces for the shadow figures pummeling his father.  Tolly's eye wound is treated by a kindly old bar maid who is unable to have children of her own and, therefore, inhabits an apartment that is full of pictures of babies with its shelves laden with spooky-looking baby dolls.  The bar maid runs a gin joint where criminals congregate.  Twenty years pass while Tolly is in jail for various stupid property crimes.  In prison, he finds one of the villains who killed his dad and, as the man is dying from blood cancer, extorts the identities of the other killers out of him:  they are Gunther, Smith, and Gela. Released from the Big House, Tolly sets about hunting down the killers and exterminating them.   This involves a complicated plot in which Tolly infiltrates the gang led by the effete fat man sitting next to the swimming pool in his bathrobe in the Normal Industries building.  Tolly is in league with two helpers:  one is Driscoll, the City prosecutor who was supposed to bring the killers of the senior Devlin to justice:  apparently WWII intervened and Driscoll ended up in the infantry as an officer of the Big Red One, the unit in which Sam Fuller served in Italy and later France and Germany (where he participated in the liberation of a concentration camp).  Driscoll has come out of the army and resumed his work in law enforcement , but he's now a United States federal lawyer, the boss of something called the Crime Committee.  Tolly's other assistant is a whore with a complexion like vanilla ice-cream.  She's working for the mob picking up drugs.  (In the film, drug addiction is treated as an abhorrent horror and peddling dope is seen as worse than murder.)  The prostitute, named Cuddles, is about to be beaten to death by one of the mobster's henchman but Devlin comes to her rescue and uses the relationship with the bad guy as his means of entering the mob in which Gela, Gunther, and Smith are leading capos.  (The girl gets whacked viciously on her pale white cheek and Fuller lovingly dwells on the wound which becomes infected or something so that the prostitute becomes feverish, hallucinating with big beads of sweat on her brow.)  Of course, Tolly will fall in love (reluctantly) with the whore and, after viciously insulting her for being a woman of ill-fame, even proposes to marry her.  Tolly figures out ways to get the gangsters to kill one another -- mostly, this is accomplished by creating fake memoranda allegedly written by federal prosecutor Driscoll implicating the bad guys as finks.  (In the movie's peculiar ethos being a fink is almost as bad as peddling dope.)  Up to the last reel, Tolly pummels the bad guys but never kills one of them.  But, then, he invades the moist environs of the swimming pool and attacks the fat guy.  He drowns him so that the criminal's corpse floats in the pool like dead whale.  On his way out of the mob headquarters, a wounded henchman guns down Tolly.  Tolly, mortally wounded, then staggers around in a desolate, empty part of the city before dropping dead among garbage cans in an alley similar to the squalid location where the movie began.  The reader will observe that the movie solves the problem of its hero killing a man by having Tolly promptly dispatched by the drowned gangster's bodyguard.  The closing sequence in the empty and dark city is undeniably impressive and looks like it was staged by Orson Welles.  

Fuller is didactic and there's an interesting lecture by Driscoll in the middle of the film in which the crusading DA, flanked by military regalia associated with the European campaign in World War Two (Big Red One memorabilia) describes organized crime in terms of generals, battalions and platoons.  Fuller wrote the movie but his intent is a little obscure.  Is he trying to imply that military honor and combat are really nothing more than an aspect of organized crime.  (In one lurid line, a mobster says "we gotta get 'em between ten and fifteen.  Send your boys out to the schoolyards to peddle dope and recruit the girls.")  The movie is well-made but, curiously, seems too long.  It's about 100 minutes long and would be better as a savage blast of hatred and violence about 80 minutes in duration.  There seems to be 15 to 20 minutes too much stuff in this picture.  

Let the Sunshine In

 I am completely baffled by Claire Denis' 2017 Let the Sunshine in.  The film is eccentric in many respects and I'm unclear as how its peculiarities cohere.

Isabel is a woman, perhaps, 50 years old with a complicated love life.  She yearns for love but ends up scandalizing and repelling everyone with whom she has sex.  She's beautiful (the part is played by Juliet Binoche) and desirable and has no difficulty finding romantic partners, but her taste in men seems, more than a little, problematic.

We first behold her naked facing up at the camera.  Then, one of her boyfriends, a burly banker, literally bangs her for the first five minutes of the movie.  The banker is a control freak and wants her to orgasm on command and he's also a bully (we see him pushing around a hapless bartender).  The banker is married and can't restrain himself from comparing Isabel to his wife whom he refuses to leave.  "You are interesting," he says (or words to that effect), "but my wife is remarkable."  Isabel doesn't need this kind of abuse in her life and, so, she orders the guy to get out.  But, for the rest of the movie, the loathsome banker hangs around, trying to seduce her.  Next, she flirts with an insanely egotistical actor.  He whines to her about problems he is having with his wife.  They end up in bed, apparently -- we're spared the scenes of intercourse -- and, then, she quarrels with the arrogant fellow and dismisses him from her life.  Whatever she's got, it's compelling because like that Banker, the actor also hangs around.  She flirts with a cab driver, but he's appalled by her and this goes nowhere.  Then, she goes on a retreat to some rural enclave called Souterraine.  This is an artist's conference -- our heroine is an abstract expressionist artist a bit like Joan Mitchell (at one point, we see a photo of Joan Mitchell).  She paints like Pollack -- stapling down her canvas on the floor and making big calligraphic marks on it with her brush.  In the country, a bunch of artists go for a little stroll, each of them trying to outdo the other in their rhapsodies about nature.  (In fact, the landscape in which they walk is completely ordinary -- a pasture with some wooded hills and a small stream.)  The pretentious art-talk drives Isabel batty and she begins howling like dog and screaming insults at the solemn French painters.  That night, in a disco, she meets a guy who has his mouth pinched to a little cupid's bow with very hollow cheeks -- he looks like a heroin addict or junkie of some kind.  Isabel's ability to pick boyfriends is unerring as is her (bad) taste in men.  She takes up with the junkie and, more or less rapes him, but he seems to be conflicted about her and, so, they part company as well. She has one suitor who wears a floppy hat like Bob Denver on Gilligan's Island, an unfortunate and surely accidental allusion.  This goes nowhere.  Isabel has also been hooking up with her ex-husband.  Someone has told her that ex-husband has been dating Isabel's patron who owns the gallery where she exhibits.  This turns out to be an untruth.  The buxom, matronly gallery owner has an African boyfriend who sleek and suave.  Isabel poaches that guy and they go for a long walk together on the empty Paris streets.  Isabel pleads with the African to come to her house and make love with her, but he resists -- he'd like them to date a little longer and has to take his kids on vacation for a month anyway.  He says that he'll find her later when he returns from holiday.  The film, already a bit elliptical and seemingly without a plot, now takes a very strange turn.  The picture cuts to a couple having a loud quarrel in a parked car.  The couple is a weeping young woman and the pug-faced bruiser, Gerard Departdieu.  Depardieu throws the girl out of his car.  We see the Eifel Tower and, then, the film cuts to Isabel being interviewed by Depardieu.   At first, the talk is therapeutic and we think that Depardieu is a psychiatrist of some kind -- he has the same gently probing manner as a good therapist.   But, it turns out that he is soothsayer.  He's telling Isabel's fortune from various photographs of her lovers over which he dangles a kind of pendulum which spins in one direction or another.  It's a cold read and Depardieu speaks in riddles and very broad generalities.  "Painting is important to you" -- a phrase that could apply to just about every middle class Parisian.  But, of course, Isabel, who is now revealed to be not only sexually promiscuous and crazy, but also extremely stupid, takes Depardieu's oracular utterances for the gospel.  The titles run as he assures her that she will meet someone the equivalent of "tall, dark and handsome", a stranger that will finally fulfill her.  Amazon Prime doesn't let you watch closing credits and so I don't know how the colloquy with Depardieu ended -- the movie just tripped off and switched to another picture (Orson Welles Confidential Report as it happened).  

Isabel is physically desirable, but she is a mess.  Her moods shift in a matter of seconds from loving adoration to raving rage.  You certainly can't identify with her -- she is an enigma from beginning to end.  I don't have any idea what the movie is supposed to be communicating.  For what it is, Let the Sunshine In  (I think the French titles translates to something like "A Nice Sunny Room") is interesting and we get a fascinating look at Paris and its restaurants, streets and cafes.  But the whole thing is completely opaque.  

Wikipedia tells me Claire Denis' movie is based on parts of Roland Barthes' book, A Lover's Discourse:  Fragments.  This is not helpful to know and it's hard for me to imagine how a text by Barthes, the semiotician, could possibly inform an episodic movie like this one.  I have no idea how to interpret the series of truisms delivered by Gerard Depardieu and I don't even have a hypothesis for why he is introduced via the fight in the car with some woman who is not part of the movie.  I suppose if I thought about this long and hard, I could come up with some justifications for Depardieu's role in the movie (which is literally marginal), but the film is too slight to waste time thinking about.   Claire Denis is a very accomplished director, and has made some masterpieces, but this isn't one of them.

The Rose of Nevada

The Rose of Nevada (Mark Jensen, 2026) is an indie film made with next-to-no budget that has garnered some good reviews.  Jensen is a filmmaker in U.K. and has made one previous movie that is also well-reviewed, a horror film called Enys Men.  The Rose of Nevada is essentially a silent movie; the film is comprised of shots that are often discordant (if striking) and don't require a synchronized soundtrack to make sense.  This means that there are no extended dialogue scenes -- people speak in short declaratory sentences or grunt at one another.  The soundtrack which is all recorded up close -- that is, no one is ever remote from the camera (and microphone) -- is post-synchronized in a rudimentary way and obviously dubbed.  This gives the film the odd ambience of a badly dubbed Italian picture from the sixties.  The movie was shot with a Bolex 16 mm camera which means that the frame is boxy and the images are grainy, often marred with streaks and fountains of debris on the film-stock.  Many shots seem to be either tail or front leader and bleed into red and yellow.   The camera can't move and, so, the movie is built from close up still-life images:  we see bleeding fish in ice, a bunch of scary ratchets and winches, rust patterns on The Rose of Nevada which is fishing boat, battered shingles, garbage in the rain, rust and corrosion patterns on pieces of iron shot from so close a vantage that the images are abstract.  There are several POV shots, but the camerawork, although effective in a discursive way, is primitive.  The movie's style of editing, the voices sounding remotely and muffled on the soundtrack, and the repetitive images of rust and rot all make the movie ultimately very tedious.  There's no acting to speak of, since the players are deprived of their natural voices and the sound emerges from some kind of deadened casket.  The movie's plot is also extremely repetitive.  The blemishes in the film's production, which some critics find powerful and rife with meaning, don't really contribute anything to the picture's pedestrian plot and, in fact, make watching the movie something of a trial.

A fishing boat, the Rose of Nevada, vanished 30 years before the movie begins.  Now, the empty boat, a tiny red tugboat sort of vessel, bobs on the water next to a monumental wall, a quay that seems constructed like an Inca fortress from huge blocks of rusticated granite.  The owner of the boat wants to put the vessel back out at sea so as to earn profits from fishing.  Three hands are recruited:  a sullen kid named Nick (or Luke) who is impoverished and lives with wife and child in an apartment with a rain-sodden rotting roof, another young man, possibly named Liam (he's just a single barfly) and an old sea dog cap'n named Murgie.  An elderly woman who appears to be demented, or may be some sort of scary sibyl, warns the townsfolk that no good will come from setting out to sea on The Rose of Nevada -- the last time the ship was on the ocean, it vanished for thirty years and with all its crew, including the ghostly old woman's son.  (She's a version of Coleridge's Ancient Mariner.)  The ship goes out to sea for a couple days and catches a great haul of fish.  But the damned Rose of Nevada is some sort of maritime time-machine.  When the boat next docks, it is 1993, more than 30 years before it set sail.  Needless to say Nick/Luke, who misses his wife and daughter, is distraught.  He goes to the place where they lived, breaks into it, and sneaking around exits the apartment through a window, badly damaging the roof (which is sketchy) and, of course, resulting in the leak in his house that tormented him earlier in the film.  Nick/Luke just wants to get back to 2025 but there's no way to accomplish this.  The other young man, Liam, discovers that he has a wife and child waiting for him on the docks.  He acclimates himself to the situation quickly and moves in with the young woman and his child.  About every two days, The Rose of Nevada sets forth on the briny deep to catch fish.  At one point, the fishing vessel is caught in a squall and almost capsizes - the net gets wrecked when it gets tangled around the prop of the boat.  Murgie, the cap'n, has said that the community relies on the fishing vessel -- for every one of us, Murgie says, there are five men ashore who are counting on us.  When the boat comes back to the harbor, everyone from the community, accordingly, helps to mend the torn nets and fix the boat.  And, so, it goes out to sea again.  In the end, Nick/Luke has a dream or hallucination about bidding farewell to his wife and child.  His wife says "There is no time..." apropos of Nick/Luke hurrying back to the boat, but the gnomic statement stands for the meaning of the movie.  

The film seems like an ineptly made episode of The Twilight Zone, a half-hour episode expanded to almost two hours.  The narrative is confusing and I have no idea what parts of the film are supposed to mean:  for instance, there's a motif of roses brought to a cliff over the rocky beach with the implication that someone is going to commit suicide by hurling themselves over the precipice;  Nick/Luke goes up to the cliff where he sheds some tears and broods over the problems of being, as Vonnegut says "unstuck in time."  But Nick/Luke doesn't kill himself and, later, even makes his own separate peace with the situation.  We last see him enjoying breakfast  with mom and dad -- I think it's his mother who becomes the scary wraith-like sibyl in the opening scenes in the movie.  The dialogue is risible:  it's all of the Popeye the Sailor species of discourse -- lots of "Arghs!" and growled imprecations in an incomprehensible dialect.  The movie is a hollow puzzle film that is much too long and confusing to be interesting.  There are excellent scenes involving the mechanics of fishing, an enterprise which seems to involve extremely hard labor.  But those parts of the movie consist of about 5 minutes -- except that the movie just keeps repeating over and over its "toilers of the sea" footage.