‘Camera’ Offers Lively View of Sam Fuller

“The Typewriter, the Rifle and the Movie Camera,” Adam Simon’s affectionate and illuminating portrait of feisty maverick filmmaker Samuel Fuller, airs tonight at 5 and 8 on the Independent Film Channel as an introduction to a series of eight Fuller films.

When the 55-minute documentary’s executive producer, Tim Robbins, remarks that Fuller made 23 films of “uncompromising power and integrity” between 1948 and 1989, he’s on target.

Working largely within the Hollywood industry, Fuller remained a stubbornly independent spirit who succeeded because he is a superb storyteller who spins yarns with unique force and energy--and on modest budgets. As a result, he’s been an inspiration to at least two generations of filmmakers. Among them are Robbins, Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino and Jim Jarmusch, all of whom comment insightfully upon Fuller and his work.

Inevitably--and rightly--Simon includes a clip from Jean-Luc Godard’s “Pierrot le Fou” (1965), in which Fuller offers his famous definition of cinema: “The film is like a battleground: love, hate, action, violence, death . . . in one word: emotion!”

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The documentary’s apt title refers to the three key phases in the life of Fuller, which began with his entrance in adolescence into the hectic, heady world of ‘20s New York tabloid journalism, which he forsook to serve in the infantry in World War II.

Fuller’s intense, firsthand knowledge of the worlds of journalism and war were to charge his films, which bristle with the force and energy Fuller still possesses at 84. Becoming personal copy boy to top Hearst editor Arthur Brisbane, Fuller learned not only the importance of truth but also its ultimate elusiveness, a notion that informs Fuller’s “Shock Corridor” (1963), in which a reporter (Peter Breck) gets himself committed to an insane asylum to track down a killer, only to lose his own mind.

“The Typewriter, the Rifle and the Movie Camera” has much of the vitality of Fuller and his movies and shifts freely back and forth between clips and interviews, with sequences of Tarantino and Robbins rummaging around the memento-crammed library and garage of Fuller’s local hillside home, to which he has recently returned with his wife, actress Christa Lang, after some 15 years’ exile in France.

When asked what he’d like to do most, Fuller, whose “Park Row” may be the definitive paean to daily journalism, said, “I would like to run a paper.”

* “The Typewriter, the Rifle and the Movie Camera” airs at 5 and 8 tonight on the Independent Film Channel and again at 5 p.m. Friday on both the Independent Film Channel and Bravo. The Independent Film Channel also is showing eight of Fuller’s movies this week, starting with “The Steel Helmet” at 6 and 9 tonight.