The macho man of the movies

Sam Fuller’s gloriously robust memoir is the inspirational book of the year, if not decade, for anyone even remotely connected to the film business. His life story, told in the punchy tabloid prose he learned as a 16-year-old crime reporter covering suicides and executions for the New York Graphic, a lurid sex-and-scandal sheet, seizes you by the scruff and flings you headlong into his harsh, funny, violent universe of independent filmmaking on the far edge of a bygone Hollywood where deals were consummated by a handshake, not a studio lawyer’s 1,000-page small-print contract.

This posthumously published autobiography -- Fuller died five years ago and it took nearly that long for the manuscript and the tapes he left behind to be edited and transcribed -- is not a how-to, yet somehow you learn more from it about how to make good movies than in almost all the technical cinema texts I have read. Sam Fuller -- his father’s birth name was Rabinovitch -- is a good teacher because he had guts, passion, anarchic emotions under the strict control of tough deadlines and a true lover’s addiction to film. Holy cow! -- to use one of his favorite expressions -- what a read, what a ride.

At the very least, Fuller’s story -- his yarn, as he liked to say -- should help us seriously reconsider some of his best films. Such as his masterpiece, “The Big Red One,” his Korean War-era movies “The Steel Helmet” and “Fixed Bayonets,” the searing, satiric Cold War drama “Pickup on South Street” and his quirky westerns, including the phallus-ridden “Forty Guns.”

In a way, his memoir is an impassioned love letter to an up-and-coming generation of filmmakers. He had a special fondness for young filmmakers such as Wim Wenders, Jim Jarmusch, Jean-Luc Godard, Francois Truffaut and Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who all adored his work and attached themselves to him, especially during his 13-year exile in Europe. (Martin Scorsese has written the memoir’s introduction.) In his characteristic growl, Fuller talks directly to novices. “You young people sitting around watching ... television! Get off your asses and go see the world!”

Yet there’s hardly a false or self-pitying or retributive note in his book. The man was in love with life, with movies and with telling the gutter truth as he saw it. And because of his background as a crime reporter and later as a virtually geriatric infantryman (at 31) with the combat-decimated “The Big Red One” division, his truth could be ugly, vicious, short, sharp and brutal. At the same time, he pays generous tribute to old-line producers, such as Darryl Zanuck, Bob Lippert and Jack Warner, who gave Fuller such latitude on some very strange projects. Perhaps it was because he worked fast and under budget -- and carried a loaded Luger pistol, which he fired instead of shouting “Action!”

Fuller worked as a tabloid reporter in the 1930s when “tabloid” wasn’t a dirty word, merely the New York Times written in street vernacular. Over and over again he urges young directors: “ ... seize your audience ... as soon as the credits hit the screen ... ! Smack people right in the face with the passion of your story!”

In outrageously over-the-top movies like “Shock Corridor” and “The Naked Kiss,” he opposed -- with his kick-’em-in-the-gut screenplays, choice of camera angles and near-anonymous casting -- the prevailing sentimentality of most Hollywood product. When Howard Hawks asked him to direct Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises,” Sam Fuller lost the job by insisting that the film open with the hero lying naked on an operating table as the surgeon drops his sawed-off testicle in a tin cup. Take that, “Three Coins in the Fountain”!

Fuller’s whole life is a study in the strategies of a scrappy “peewee” kid from a poor family -- his widowed mother raised seven children on almost no money -- thrown into the reasonless chaos of a merciless Depression-soiled adult world. He sold newspapers on street corners, joined hobos in boxcars, chummed with whores and murderers, hustled and muscled -- and wrote -- his way out of poverty. Pulp fiction was his metier; he wrote a dozen down-market novels before being lured to Hollywood by older journalists who waved their big fat checks in front of Fuller’s dazzled eyes.

In post-World War II Hollywood, Fuller was one of the very few with battlefield experience. Miraculously, he had come out of the war (“the greatest crime story of the century”) alive, with a bullet in his chest and a Silver Star for gallantry. He endured combat in North Africa, Sicily, the Normandy landing on D-day all the way through the French hedgerows and wild-dog Nazi resistance inside Germany. Somehow he stayed sane, buoyed by a gift for survival he would need to play, and buck, the Hollywood system. Part of this talent lay in his choice of mentors, or what he calls “father figures”: the great popular newspaper editor Arthur Brisbane, director John Ford, even colonels and generals in the Army who befriended him.

Again and again, Fuller’s story comes back to front-line combat. He is intensely honored to have served in the mud and snow, to have survived the American army debacle at North Africa’s Kasserine Pass, Anzio, the Battle of the Bulge and the horror of stumbling onto Falkenau concentration camp in Germany. He came out of the war’s “everyday lunacy” tougher, harder, even more unsparing of himself. But so proud. Pride -- in an old-fashioned, almost Victorian sense -- in work, life, in himself shines through every page of his memoir. As he might say, it jumps out from the page and grabs you.

It helped that he had relentless physical energy. Well into his 60s, as an actor in a Wim Wenders thriller (“The American Friend”), he wanted to do his own stunt: falling from a speeding train. At 80 he and independent filmmaker Jim Jarmusch paddled a dugout canoe into Brazil’s Mato Grosso jungle where 50 years before he had tried to make a movie among the Karaja native peoples.

Psychologically, Fuller was “under fire” all his life. But he followed the good infantryman’s rule to push on because running away from the enemy is more likely to get you killed. With more than 100 movie titles registered with the Writers Guild, a huge number of movies he either made, wrote or acted in, published novels and unmade scripts galore, he was inexorable, unbribable, unregenerate in his odd, twisted, dark, stoic and funny personal obsessions. And how is this for advice to any of us tempted by the fake expediency of showbiz?

“Even when things looked really bleak, I remained optimistic, excited by the yarns I was working on. One of the tricks I’ve learned is to tap constantly into my creative juices, no matter whether there’s a producer to finance the movie or not. When you’re least suspecting it, one’ll show up. You damn well better be ready to pull a script you really love out of your desk drawer.”

The operative words are “really love.” He did a few hack films, to which he freely confesses, but for most of his creative life he wormed his way under and through the barbed wire of the studio financing system like the agile rifleman he’d once been. For more than 30 years his heart was set on only one project, the semiautobiographical World War II “The Big Red One.” This picture, virtually starless (like most Fuller films) except for Lee Marvin as the sergeant, grows the more I watch it even in its present chopped-up one hour-plus version on TV. (Originally it ran to 4 hours and 20 minutes.)

In my opinion, “The Big Red One,” with its mixture of routine cruelty and offhand compassion, is the best of all war movies. His story of a small squad of young infantrymen learning their killing trade is a sobering antidote to the triumphalism, implied or explicit, of Tom Brokaw’s “greatest generation” and “realistic” battle movies like “Saving Private Ryan.”

When all of Fuller’s self-mythologizing and James Cagney-like tough guy act are put aside, what remains is a cold fury at war. He hates the patriotic sentimentality of John Wayne movies, “ ... when some officer invariably says, ‘These men have given their lives for their country.’ ... They didn’t give their lives. Their lives were taken away. They were robbed.” If it is possible to be an anti-fascist, democratic, war-inspired antiwar peacenik Old Soldier, Fuller fits the bill.

When for five long years Fuller couldn’t get arrested in Hollywood or make a film, the Europeans discovered him, to his vast amusement and secret pleasure. French critics and audiences especially went wild over almost everything he had done. Jean-Luc Godard called “Shock Corridor” a “masterpiece of barbarian cinema.” “I didn’t know what the hell that meant, but I was happy if it sold tickets,” Fuller says with a tinge of the false naivete that he sometimes lapses into.

In fact, although self-educated -- he was expelled from high school for faking a student “orgy” for his scandal newspaper -- he was erudite cinematically and in world literature. Put him in front of his battered old Royal typewriter, shove a cigar in his mouth, and Fuller would “crank out” a cheapo yarn about redemption, sacrifice, love and betrayal to rival, or surpass, far more prestigious Academy Award bores of his contemporaries. He might title it “I Shot Jesse James” or “Dead Pigeon on Beethoven Street,” but the elemental emotions would be descended from Shakespeare or Chaucer.

Fuller died in 1997, shortly after dictating this memoir with the help of his wife, Christa Lang, and Jerome Henry Rudes, founder of the Avignon Film Festival. His last words are, again, for young film lovers. “Okay, all you new voices, let yourself be heard!”