Samuel Fuller’s hard-nosed cinema

“Van Gogh was a great inspiration for me, a guy for whom life was work and work was life. I wanted to be like him, except I didn’t want to go nuts and cut off my ear.” — Samuel Fuller

It seems only appropriate that the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s “Fuller at Fox” film series opens Friday with the most accomplished work Samuel Fuller made for the studio, 1953’s “Pickup on South Street.”

Richard Widmark plays a pickpocket who makes a big mistake when he accidentally steals a roll of microfilm that the communists want.

“It has such great dialogue,” says Fox’s chief restorationist, Schawn Belston. “I love that sort of over-the-top masculinity of all of his films. Richard Widmark has never been better. He’s a misunderstood tough, which is the protagonist in most of his films: the misunderstood bad guy.”

But the film is perhaps best known for Fuller’s brilliantly constructed scene between Oscar-nominated Thelma Ritter, who plays a tired ex-pickpocket who will sell out anyone for a buck, and Richard Kiley as a commie thug seeking the microfilm.

Ritter is sitting up in bed in her tiny, cramped shack; to the right of her bed, a record is playing. Kiley is trying to get information from her. As Ritter realizes Kiley is going to kill her, Fuller uses tight close-ups on the two actors as they play a verbal game of cat and mouse. When Kiley finally pulls out his gun, Fuller pans to the record player. And as the shot rings out, the record keeps skipping.

With a bold, in-your-face directing style, Fuller was a true maverick and an idol to numerous directors, including Jean-Luc Godard, Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese, who once said, “If you don’t like the films of Sam Fuller, then you don’t like cinema.”

Born in 1912, he became a crime reporter for the New York Graphic. Then during World War II, as a member of the 16th Infantry Regiment, 1st Infantry Division, Fuller participated in landings in Africa, Sicily and Normandy. He was at the liberation of the concentration camp at Falkenau and was awarded the Bronze Star, the Silver Star and the Purple Heart.

His wartime experience fueled his 1980 war film “The Big Red One,” which drew its title from the nickname of the 1st Infantry Division.

After working as a scriptwriter, Fuller made the move to directing with 1949’s “I Shot Jesse James,” making a name for himself with his third film, 1951’s “The Steel Helmet,” a gritty action-drama that was one of the first movies made about the then-current Korean War.

“Every studio wanted Sam,” recalls his widow, Christa Fuller, who will be introducing the screening Friday. “He had meetings with Louis B. Mayer at MGM, with Columbia. He was a true auteur.”

But it was Fox studio head Darryl F. Zanuck who landed him. “He was obviously interested in the more artistic-type directors like Fuller, Jules Dassin and even Elia Kazan,” Belston says of Zanuck. “It’s interesting. During the late ‘40s and early ‘50s, he allowed filmmakers to experiment.”

Screening with “Pickup” on Friday is 1951’s “Fixed Bayonets,” another provocative Korean War thriller, about an American platoon abandoned behind enemy lines. It’s one of the first films featuring James Dean, who has a small role as a soldier.

Saturday’s offerings are 1955’s noir “House of Bamboo,” which was Hollywood’s first film shot in Japan after World War II and offers some great two-fisted action sequences and a viciously perfect turn from Robert Ryan as a GI who is now running a ruthless Tokyo-based crime syndicate, and Fuller’s first color film, 1954’s “Hell and High Water,” which reunited the director with Widmark, this time as a onetime Navy officer turned mercenary submarine captain.

Screening Aug. 13 are the 1957 sagebrush melodrama “Forty Guns,” with Barbara Stanwyck, and “China Gate,” from the same year, one of the first films to explore the French Indochina War. Gene Barry and Nat “King” Cole head a band of hired guns paid to go behind enemy lines to destroy weapons belonging to the guerrilla forces. Angie Dickinson plays Lucky Legs, a sultry Eurasian woman who helps smuggle them to China.

Dickinson says that Fuller was “very strong on what he wanted. And in ‘China Gate,’ he liked long takes, and long takes are very hard because you don’t want to … up. He did that a lot because it’s very effective. You keep the scenes moving.”

She had met Fuller earlier when she was asked to dub one of the actresses in his 1957 film “Run of the Arrow.”

“We just got to be buddies. He, Richard Brooks … myself, we would hang out playing canasta and we would swim on Sundays and go to a Chinese dinner. He would always have a cigar. He would always tell stories of the war, The Big Red One. He was such a great storyteller.”

Christa Fuller acknowledges that her husband always had “ups and downs in his career. Being an auteur is very difficult in Hollywood.”

After he left Fox, Fuller’s independent “Shock Corridor” (1963) and “The Naked Kiss” (1964) were warmly embraced by his enthusiasts, but he never repeated the success he had in the 1950s. By the mid-’60s he was doing episodic TV and appearing in such films as Godard’s “Pierrot le Fou” (1965) and Dennis Hopper’s “The Last Movie” (1971).

Despite some strong reviews, “The Big Red One” wasn’t a hit and his 1982 film, “White Dog,” was mistakenly perceived as racist and didn’t even open in the United States until 1991. Fuller moved to France, where he worked sporadically, returning to the U.S. a few years before his death in 1997.

“He was very moral,” Fuller says of her husband. “He was 30 years ahead of his time.”

susan.king@latimes.com