A Role Model for Maverick Filmmakers : Movies: Whether writer, director or producer of Hollywood B-pictures, Samuel Fuller has gone his own way with a vengeance. And gotten away with it.

By KENNETH TURAN

May 15, 1995 12 AM PT

TIMES FILM CRITIC

The film is like a battlefield. Love, hate, action, violence, death . . . in one word, emotion.

--Samuel Fuller

Nothing changes faster in the film world than directorial fashion. In hardly any time, today’s young firebrand becomes yesterday’s phlegmatic hack. But over the last 30 years, one taste has remained constant: Several generations of maverick filmmakers have felt compelled to pay homage to Samuel Fuller by putting him in one of their movies.

It started with Jean-Luc Godard, who gave Fuller a role in “Pierrot Le Fou” in 1965. Dennis Hopper did the same with “The Last Movie,” Wim Wenders followed with “The American Friend,” and Aki Kaurismaki even found room for him in “La Vie de Boheme.”

Now comes “Tigrero: A Film That Never Was,” which began a weekends-only run at the Sunset 5 Saturday. It is not only directed by Aki’s brother, Mika Kaurismaki, but it co-stars Fuller with yet another rebel director, “Stranger Than Paradise’s” Jim Jarmusch.

Though Fuller, with a cigar never far from his lips, is always an arresting presence, he is not primarily known as an actor. Intense, opinionated, driven, Fuller has appeared in all these films because as writer, director and producer of gritty Hollywood B-pictures, he has been a prime role model for the independent film movement, someone who went his own way with a vengeance and got away with it.

So while “Tigrero” has its charms, the best thing about its arrival is that it has resulted in a 12-weekend Fuller retrospective, also at the Sunset 5, continuing Saturday with “House of Bamboo” and such landmarks of Fulleriana as “Pickup on South Street,” “Shock Corridor” and “Underworld USA.”

“Tigrero” is a documentary about one Fuller film that never happened, a typically ripping yarn about two men and a woman in the heart of the Brazilian rain forest that was to have been made in the 1950s starring John Wayne, Ava Gardner and Tyrone Power.

In this meandering documentary, garnished with Fuller’s unmistakable staccato voice, he and Jarmusch set out in search of the Karaja, the tribe Fuller photographed in 16mm during a research trip to the rain forest in 1954, in hopes of showing them the original footage and recording their reactions.

To turn from this amusing trifle to Fuller’s completed films is to discover one of the most intriguing of American directors, a maker of self-described “cheap program fillers” whose often sentimental, always crude and garish films cast quite a spell.

Usually made quickly for very little money, Fuller’s productions feature outlandish situations and swaggering dialogue, everything from a baldheaded prostitute beating her drunken pimp with a shoe in “The Naked Kiss” to a weary World War II general shaking his head in “Merrill’s Marauders” and saying, “Sneaking 3,000 men through this jungle is gonna drive me nuts!”

Yet what they lack in elegance these films make up for in purely cinematic energy. Because if nothing else, Fuller has an intuitive understanding of what makes for excitement on the screen. His films may be simplistic, but they are bursting with activity and zest. Says the man himself, “I love confusion, I love conflict, I love argument,” all of which end up in his movies, often all at once.

Fuller comes by his freneticism honestly, through an apprenticeship in journalism before it got even part-way respectable. He entered the business as a 12-year-old copy boy on the New York Journal, became personal assistant to Arthur Brisbane, one of the great reporters of the day, and in 1928, at the ripe age of 17, joined the San Diego Sun as an eager crime reporter.

Fuller’s experience in the criminal netherworld helped shape his films’ view of life as a treacherous, untrustworthy affair where the heroes are cynics, criminals or both. His other formative experience was World War II, where he won the Bronze and Silver stars and a Purple Heart and formed what he later called his “Six Commandments of the War Film.” Sample dictum: “Never allow a dying GI to bring out his wallet to look at his fiancee’s photograph. That never happens.”

Much of Fuller’s stronger, stranger work is set in the civilian era. “The Naked Kiss,” for instance, featuring Constance Towers as that baldheaded prostitute (who wears a wig for much of the movie), mixes the treacly treatment of handicapped children with some nasty thoughts about small-town American society. And “Shock Corridor” has a scoop-crazed reporter committing himself to an asylum where, among other indignities, he is almost clawed to pieces by a fierce bunch of nymphomaniacs.

Probably the best single introduction to Fuller is “Pickup on South Street,” his only film to win any kind of award, a Bronze Lion at the 1953 Venice Film Festival. Starring Richard Widmark as an amoral pickpocket who finds himself mixed up with Commies and counterspies, it also has an attractive performance by Jean Peters as the bad girl he comes to love and a classic Academy Award-nominated one by Thelma Ritter as the tie-selling stool pigeon Moe. “Thelma missed the Oscar by one vote that year,” the director claims.

“I want something that’s exciting,” Fuller said about his storytelling style in an interview several years ago. “It’s not exciting to me if a man says to the girl, ‘Look, I’ll meet you at the corner drugstore at 5 o’clock.’ I wouldn’t write that, not unless I knew that when the girl walks into the corner drugstore, she’s going to have her head blown off.”

Here’s looking at you, Sam.

The Fuller Retrospective Schedule

Saturday and May 21: “House of Bamboo”

May 27-29: “Pickup on South Street”

June 3-4: “Run of the Arrow”

June 10-11: “China Gate”

June 17-18: “Forty Guns”

June 24-25: “Verboten!”

July 1-2: “The Crimson Ki-mono”

July 8-9: “Underworld USA”

July 15-16: “Shock Corridor”

July 22-23: “The Naked Kiss”