Samuel Fuller

[Alethia]

in tigrero, fuller and jarmusch travel back to an area in some jungle where fuller had gone about forty years before and shot alot of good footage (some of which appears in SHOCK CORRIDOR) and lived with a tribe, etc...i wont really tell you much else, but its good.  im not a fan of jarmusch as a filmmaker, but he's really funny alongside sam.

[Two Lane Blacktop]

I just got through watching White Dog after wanting to see it for many, many years.  Holy crap-  what a disturbing, DISTURBING movie.

This is my first exposure to Sam Fuller, and I have to say, I think I'm a fan already.  His whole depiction of idealism in a savage, brutal world reminded me a little bit of David Lynch or Larry Cohen, but with ZERO humor to cut the tension.  The acting was a little hammy at points, but in a B-movie that's not usually a bad thing.  Some of the visuals were absolutely inspired...  someone upthread mentioned the last shot of the movie, and that one got to me, too.  (As well as tricks like the war movie (was that one of Fuller's own?) playing too loud on the TV during the attempted-rape scene...  unnerving and brilliant.)

How this movie was found to be unreleasable in the U.S. is absolutely beyond me.  This movie is so completely ANTI-racism, and manages to be so in a gritty, non-preachy, at times depressing way, one that asks as many questions as it answers.  Highly, highly recommended.

2LB

PS-  I have a question for anyone who has seen the movie.  Spoilers below the next line:

SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER







WTF did the dog attack Burl Ives at the end?  Was that just a random "twist ending" or was it meant to show...  I dunno, how hard it is to un-teach someone savagery?  That threw me off a little bit.

[Two Lane Blacktop]

Just watched "House Of Bamboo" tonight, and saw "The Naked Kiss" a few weeks ago.  Sam Fuller has become one of my favorite directors.  Wow.

Unlike a lot of the directors I like, Fuller is so UN-gimmicky...  he seems to be all about propelling the story forward, although he has such a GREAT eye for bizarre,  off-kilter scenes that will stick in your mind.  The first scene of "The Naked Kiss" is one example (I suspect y'all already know it so I won't go into it here), the first robbery in "House Of Bamboo" is another...  the main characters (a bunch of hoods, plus our hero Robert Stack) hold up some kind of industrial site in Tokyo, masking their flight with smoke pots they stole earlier in the film.  There were several shots of the fedora'd, trench-coated hoods running between clouds of billowing white smoke, huge chemical tanks in the background, that I will never forget.  Totally iconic.

The whole homo-erotic thing between Roberts Ryan and Stack (it seemed to be mostly one-directional) was FASCINATING to me, especially for a flick done in the 50s.

I started with Fuller just because I was curious about "White Dog" (described upthread), but like I said, he is fast becoming one of my favorite directors.

[samsong]

Forty Guns is the shit.

[Pubrick]

Forty Guns is the shit.

another well written samsong review.

[MacGuffin]

A Second Look: Fuller's 'White Dog'
The controversial 1982 film about a German shepherd taught to attack black people is released on DVD.
By Dennis Lim; Los Angeles Times

A cigar-chomping newspaperman turned two-fisted pulp auteur, Samuel Fuller (1912-1997) never had much use for subtlety. His signature style -- lurid, didactic, in-your-face -- would seem to leave little room for ambiguity. But because Fuller's films were often more complex than his tabloid sensibility suggested, he spent a good deal of his career being misunderstood and battling controversy.

His breakthrough film, 1951's Korean War drama "The Steel Helmet," was labeled pro-Communist for depicting racism within the ranks of the U.S. Army. Although considered red-baiting propaganda by some, his Cold War-era noir "Pickup on South Street" (1953) was famously singled out for condemnation by J. Edgar Hoover, who deemed the Richard Widmark character insufficiently patriotic. But no Fuller film whipped up a bigger storm than "White Dog" (1982), his stark moral fable about a racist German shepherd.

With the threat of a boycott looming after the NAACP took issue with the premise, the film's studio, Paramount, deemed it unfit for both theatrical and home-video release. It was Fuller's last Hollywood movie and has been largely unseen outside of a brief belated run in 1991 and occasional late-night TV airings. It finally makes its DVD debut this week, courtesy of the Criterion Collection.

"White Dog" came with an intriguing pedigree. It was based on the 1970 book by Romain Gary, a semiautobiographical novel in which the French author and his wife, actress Jean Seberg, encounter a stray dog that has apparently been programmed to attack black people on sight. Gary's book evolves into a wide-ranging meditation on race relations in this country, drawing on the queasy mood of late-'60s, newly post-civil-rights America and explicitly discussing Seberg's involvement with the Black Panthers.

The idea for a movie adaptation had floated around Hollywood for some time; Roman Polanski and Arthur Penn were among the directors previously attached.

When the project landed with Fuller, who had worked infrequently since the mid- 1960s and whose previous film, 1980's "The Big Red One," was butchered by the studio, he revised the script with his friend Curtis Hanson, who had worked on an earlier version.

Fuller's movie preserves the thematic kernel and the Hollywood Hills setting of Gary's novel, but few of the details remain. The female protagonist, the canine's adoptive protector, is still an actress (played by Kristy McNichol), though not an activist or movie star. A central character, the black animal trainer who tries to re-educate the dog, has been substantially altered. In the novel, he retrains the dog to attack whites; the trainer in the film (Paul Winfield) is a nobler figure, driven to cure the savage beast, whose racism he views not as something to be stamped out but unlearned.

The white dog registers as a flesh-and-blood creature as well as a free-floating metaphor. And while both Gary and Fuller make the point that racism is not innate but taught, they arrive at different conclusions when pondering what it means to reverse it.

In its blunt, bludgeoning way, "White Dog" ranks among the toughest and most probing examinations of racism in American cinema. Fuller's brute-force direction gives this outrageous allegory the hyperbolic treatment it demands. The attacks are sudden and sickening, staged for maximum horror and typically accompanied by Ennio Morricone's weeping strings -- the most shocking of the hate crimes takes place in a church, beneath a stained-glass window of Francis of Assisi, patron saint of animals.

The Criterion disc features video interviews with Hanson and producer Jon Davison, but the most telling extra, reprinted in the booklet, is a 1982 piece by Fuller, conceptualized as an "interview" with the film's canine star. In this alternately funny and sobering mock-Q&A, the white dog stresses repeatedly that it was a man who made his character a monster ("Man is capable of hatred. Animals are not") and, in fluent Fuller-ese, turns the tables on his director: "Doesn't your world make you want to vomit?"

[Alexandro]

Can't believe I never posted anything on this thread.
Fuller is masterful. And I personally love the way he talks and comes across in interviews. there's a true filmmaker for you.

From what I've seen of him, is hard to pick a favorite. Shock Corridor, maybe. But Pick up on South Street is so beautifully shot and it's just perfect, not one second wasted. that film should be shown to every aspiring screenwriter and filmmaker and how to do EVERYTHING right.

[Mr. Merrill Lehrl]

http://trailersfromhell.com/blog/2011/06/02/watch-immediately-sam-fullers-screen-test-for-the-godfather-part-2/

"That's Samuel Fuller reading for the role of Hyman Roth in Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather Part II. Sure, Sam Fuller made a cameo (sometimes extended cameo) or two in his time, but never for something quite like this. While the role ultimately went to Lee Strasberg (who was Academy Award nominated for Supporting Actor trophy), it's fun to watch this and imagine Samuel Fuller living it up in Cuba or twisting Fredo to break Michael's heart. Very cool stuff here."

[Gold Trumpet]

That's a great video to watch. Fuller had the personality and ability to have done more acting roles. Just never came his way and considering his demeanor is so hospitable, it's a small shame.

[wilder]

Sam Fuller's Lost Novel 'Brainquake,' Coming To Shelves In 2014
via The Playlist

While Sam Fuller is best known for being the filmmaker behind such classics as "Naked Kiss," "Pickup On South Street," "Shock Corridor," "The Big Red One" and more, he was also an author. Not only did he pen novelizations for some of his films, he also wrote a small handful of original works too, and one that has never seen the light of day in the English language is now coming.

Titan and Hard Case Crime are bringing "Brainquake" to shelves this September. It was penned by Fuller while he was in self-imposed exile in France, fighting with Paramount over the cut of "White Dog."

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