FULL METAL REVIEW

Crusty old warrior Sam Fuller (“The Steel Helmet,” “Fixed Bayonets,” “Merrill’s Marauders,” “Big Red One”) is to war movies what John Ford was to Westerns. So we were curious about his reaction to Stanley Kubrick’s “Full Metal Jacket.”

“He’s a great film maker, but I don’t like training films,” said Fuller, based in Paris and the recent subject of an homage in Santa Barbara. “I got the first part in five minutes and if it wasn’t Kubrick, I’d have left after 10.

“I think I wanted him to say something else: ‘What are we doing here?’ We’re a country that can say anything we want. I made a film during Korea in which a character said, ‘If this is a police action, why don’t they send the police?’ The military didn’t like it but I said it anyway.”

The best thing in the film was the girl sniper, Fuller thought: “I don’t know how he got that wonderful expression of contempt on her dying face. It was beautiful. It was war.”