CHAPTER FIVE

The Final Battles, 1965–1997

The last thirty-plus years of Fuller’s career saw his passionate, gutsy filmmaking embraced by critics and younger directors even as his chances to complete projects were few and far between. After The Naked Kiss, Fuller directed only a handful of compromised and/or poorly distributed works, with his most personal achievement, The Big Red One, not even approximating his original vision until its reconstruction following his death. Though Fuller maintained an optimistic attitude and produced a steady stream of scenarios, screenplays, and novels, he was never again able to achieve the consistency of production he enjoyed during the 1950s and early 1960s.

Fuller’s filmmaking during this period was defined by opportunity and marked by eclecticism. Only one of his projects, The Big Red One, originated solely with him; the rest were already in development when Fuller was approached to direct. As a result, an unusually large percentage of his work as a director during this period was on adaptations or screenplays already written by others. In addition, the majority of his final pictures were shot abroad with international casts and crews, distinguishing them in performance and style from his earlier movies. Finally, while Fuller supervised the initial editing of each picture and deposited a cut he approved with the producers, half of his late-period films were recut without his involvement. These factors result in a series of pictures that bear the least consistent relationship to each other and to Fuller’s overall aesthetic compared to any other period in his career. Only The Big Red One—especially in its reconstructed form—and White Dog fully embody the spirit of his vision.

Critical Recognition, Professional Frustration

The initial decades after the dissolution of the studio system were tumultuous for Hollywood, as studio executives struggled to define profitable production strategies, revise content regulation, and target their most loyal customers. Continuing a trend that began a decade earlier, the major studios in the 1960s released family-oriented blockbusters such as Doctor Zhivago (1965) and The Sound of Music (1965) to anchor their distribution slates, utilizing international locations and talent to add production value and increase foreign sales. A string of failed blockbusters from 1966 to 1968 and the reduction of revenues from selling broadcasting rights to television initiated an industry-wide recession in 1969, however, prompting a period of readjustment. At the same time, changing social mores and the increasing irrelevance of the Production Code forced a Code revision in 1966 and its replacement by a ratings system in 1968. A classification system that rated films according to their appropriateness for various age groups freed filmmakers from having to create pictures that appeared acceptable for all and enabled them to include more explicit material designed to appeal to mature audiences. With the box-office success of Blow-Up (1966), The Graduate (1967), and Bonnie and Clyde (1967), a younger generation of studio executives began to shape a new production strategy, one centered around comparatively lower-cost films that challenged classical conventions, embraced sex and violence, and were targeted at the most frequent moviegoers: youth between the ages of sixteen and twenty-four. From the late 1960s through the mid-1970s, Hollywood released more character-driven stories that featured looser plots, overt stylization, a mix of tones, and explicit sex and violence. Never before had the American film industry seemed so primed for the provocative pictures of Samuel Fuller.

Indeed, critical recognition of Fuller’s work was on the rise around the globe, and he was considered one of the hippest contemporary filmmakers by the younger generation. Champions of auteurism—an approach that elevated directors who consistently placed a distinctive stylistic stamp on their work—had long been fans of Fuller, beginning with Luc Moullet and Jean Domarchi in France, who first wrote about him for Cahiers du Cinéma in 1956; continuing with the English critic V. F. Perkins, who introduced him to readers of Movie in 1962; and finally extending to America’s Andrew Sarris, who wrote of Fuller in 1968 for The American Cinema: “It is the artistic force with which his ideas are expressed that makes his career so fascinating to critics.”1 In 1969 the Edinburgh Film Festival featured a retrospective of Fuller’s work, publishing the first critical anthology on his films, and monographs by Phil Hardy and Nicholas Garnham followed in 1970 and 1971, respectively. Beginning with Jean-Luc Godard, admiring directors also approached Fuller to appear in their films. Dennis Hopper cast Fuller as a gun-toting film director in The Last Movie (1971), while Wim Wenders slotted him into a series of films beginning with The American Friend (1977) and concluding with his final screen appearance in The End of Violence (1997). Even Steven Spielberg got into the game, placing Fuller in a bit part in 1941 (1979) as a thank-you for Hell and High Water, one of his favorite pictures. As his fourth decade in the film business dawned, Fuller seemed to be everywhere—everywhere except behind the camera.

Writer/director François Truffaut (left) and Samuel Fuller (right), personal friends and lovers of cinema. Truffaut’s generation of French film critics was the first to identify Fuller as a significant American auteur. Chrisam Films, Inc.

Despite the seemingly receptive industrial and critical climate, Fuller had very little success getting films produced and distributed from the late 1960s through the 1980s. A series of feature projects he wrote either collapsed before production or ended up being directed by others: The Flowers of Evil, The Eccentrics, Riata (released as The Deadly Trackers, 1973), The Klansman (1974), The Charge at San Juan Hill, Let’s Get Harry (1986), and The Chair vs. Ruth Snyder. Only Shark!, Dead Pigeon on Beethoven Street, The Big Red One, White Dog, Thieves After Dark, and Street of No Return bore Fuller’s credit as writer-director in his later years, and he lost control of the editing of three of them. In between film projects, Fuller wrote adaptations and novels, including The Naked Kiss (1964), Crown of India (1966), 144 Piccadilly (1971), Dead Pigeon on Beethoven Street (1974), The Big Red One (1980), Quint’s World (1988), and the children’s book Pecos Bill and the Soho Kid (1986). Traveling around the world; hanging out with the likes of Godard, Wenders, François Truffaut, Luis Buñuel, Roman Polanski, and Peter Bogdanovich; marrying Christa Lang in 1967 and welcoming daughter Samantha in 1975; and constantly writing, writing, writing—the man was not idle. But the nature of independent filmmaking was risky, financing and distribution were never certain, and Fuller’s personal interests were not always in step with the direction of the film industry.

Among Fuller’s multiple unproduced script projects from the late 1960s and early 1970s, several illustrate not only a continuation of the shift toward increasing subjectivity and sensationalism initiated in Shock Corridor, but also tentative attempts to meld his interest in topical themes with youth-friendly content. Three projects, The Flowers of Evil, The Eccentrics, and Sound of Murder, drop much of the didacticism of The Rifle in favor of a more playful approach to sex and violence that is integrated with stories drawn from popular culture. A lack of sentimentality and an embrace of irony run through all three projects, linking them to much of Fuller’s earlier work. However, the material available on the latter two stories highlights the generational and cultural division between Fuller and the industry’s favored youth audience that undermined the market value of his yarns.

The first project, The Flowers of Evil, originated in the mid-1960s as a treatment written by Noel Burch and Mark Goodman of a modern-day Lysistrata, Aristophanes’s tale of Greek women who withhold sex in order to force their men to end the Peloponnesian War.2 According to interviews, Fuller developed the idea into a bizarre “semi-science fiction thing” about a secret society called the Flowers of Evil that enlists beautiful young woman who use sex, violence, and an enervating vapor to eradicate warfare around the globe. The opening scene allegedly features a ballet dancer who is a member of the Flowers bounding off a stage to avoid a killer female motorcycle gang, while the script ends in an ambiguous fashion typical of Fuller as the protagonist spirals endlessly into outer space. While two American producers in Paris agreed to make the picture and Variety reported the imminent start of production in 1966, the project fell through when financing failed to appear.3 The Flowers of Evil reflects Fuller’s delight in turning genre conventions on their ear, as it takes the James Bond international spy genre so popular in the 1960s and turns its sexy temptresses into peacenik protagonists. Although it is difficult to gauge the tone of the film without access to a scenario or script, the story appears to contain a parodic tone similar to that of Fuller’s later German production, Dead Pigeon on Beethoven Street.

Also in the late 1960s Fuller wrote The Eccentrics, a psychedelic melodrama set in a coastal hippie encampment and featuring interlocking romantic triangles, jealousy, betrayal, and multiple murders.⁴ The Eccentrics inched closer to being produced than The Flowers of Evil, with a Spanish distributor on board and the casting of Jennifer Jones as the lead. A month before shooting was scheduled to begin, however, Jones backed out due to personal problems and the producers encountered legal trouble, prompting Fuller to drop the project and leave the country.⁵ The story concerns Sherry MacMasters, an untraditional, Nobel Prize–winning author who is working on a book entitled Imagination Is the Mistress of Riot. For inspiration, MacMasters surrounds herself with artistic, unwashed youth who view her as a creative guru. Much of the plot consists of MacMasters’s visions and dream images, until by the end of the picture she is so fully ensconced in her imagination that she has difficulty distinguishing the real world from her dream world. Here Fuller’s experiments with subjectivity take their most fully developed form, as MacMasters’s unconscious becomes the dominant narrative force, ultimately indistinguishable in the script from “objective” scenes in real life. As with the bleak ending of Shock Corridor, The Eccentrics concludes with MacMasters trapped by the experiment she created and unable to control the forces she unleashed. While the sexy spies of The Flowers of Evil might have had some youth appeal, not since Verboten! equated Germany’s teenage neo-Nazis with America’s juvenile delinquents did a Fuller script incorporate young people into the plotline in such a major way. The Eccentrics particularly exploits the flowering of the psychedelic era and the hippie subculture in its characterizations and settings. Nevertheless, the protagonist remains an outsider looking in, and the tragic consequences of her naiveté, as well as the working title of the project—The Kooks—suggest that Fuller harbored real ambivalence about the hippie community the script attempts to represent.

Other than The Flowers of Evil and The Eccentrics, most of Fuller’s unproduced scripts from the 1960s and early 1970s ignore Hollywood’s emerging focus on the youth market and hew toward war, thriller, and biopic stories; the lone exception is an early-1970s project entitled Sound of Murder, described in treatment form as “a story of horror, rock music, and ecology.”6 Sound of Murder combines campy horror with rock and roll and intergenerational conflict, qualifying it as perhaps the only Fuller story of this era to include the key elements of a classic teen picture. The story concerns Swooner, an ecology spokesperson and former singing star of the 1920s and 1930s who lives next door to a music club and dreams about eradicating rock and roll. The scenario indicates that “in a weird scene,” Swooner hatches a plan to build a glass sound booth with a deadly secret: when a certain decibel level is reached inside, the person listening to the music will be electrocuted. Using the glass booth, Swooner lures several local musicians to their deaths, but his plan begins to unravel when he sets his sights on Freddy Fulton, the hottest singing star of the day. Members of the Freddy Fulton fan club eventually track Swooner down and corner him, aided by a tip from Frye, Swooner’s houseboy. Although Frye has pretended that he is mute, he actually loves rock music, and has been waiting for an opportunity to eliminate Swooner in order to inherit his property. At the end of the film, the fan club kids lock Swooner in the glass booth and force him to listen to rock music until he learns to love it; upon hearing the dreaded music, Swooner screams in agony, increasing the decibel level enough to kill him.

While the loopy plot of Sound of Murder contains all the right elements to appeal to the teenage drive-in crowd, its perspective and its timing illustrate why Fuller never successfully exploited the youth market. In order to fulfill the expectations of a teen picture, the plot needs to be told from the point of view of the young rock fans. Sound of Murder is scripted from the perspective of a character who not only does not like young people, but who also actually wants to kill them. While grumpy old people who just do not get it are an important oppositional force in teen films, they are not the protagonists. In addition, by 1972, when the film is set, rock is no longer quite the same rebellious and threatening music that had middle-class parents in a panic in 1956. Instead, rock is in the mainstream, adults have embraced it, and anyone who hates rock is likely to be considered a fuddy-duddy by a forty-year-old as much as by a kid who is fifteen. The cycle of rebellious rock and roll teenpics had waned by the late 1950s; at the start of the 1970s, purveyors of teen exploitation films like American International Pictures had already passed through beach movies, biker movies, and drug movies. With the release of American Graffiti in 1973 the teen picture confidently grew into adulthood. Sound of Murder would have been a fabulous AIP picture in 1957 with a little bit of tweaking; by the 1970s, however, it was behind the times.

While Fuller was a master of low-budget filmmaking and aggressively incorporated sex, violence, and topical themes into his films, any similarity between the narratives of his pictures and those dominating the youth exploitation market end there. The kinds of stories he was interested in telling simply did not lend themselves to the conflicts and genres that filled the 1960s and 1970s drive-ins. As Fuller moved into the final phase of his career, his mushrooming interest in extreme sensationalism, as well as his generational distance from teens, only carried him further away from major market trends.

Loose Ends: Shark! and Dead Pigeon on Beethoven Street

The first Fuller project to make it into production after The Naked Kiss was Shark!, a mish-mash of a movie that Fuller disavowed after losing control of the final cut. The film began as one of a series of coproductions planned by Skip Steloff and Marc Cooper’s Heritage Productions and José Luis Calderón’s Cinematográfica Calderón, in which each producing partner put up half the financing and split international distribution rights.7 The script was initially written by Ken Hughes, based on the Victor Canning novel His Bones Are Coral; Fuller rewrote the script and titled it Caine, eventually sharing screenwriting credit with John Kings-bridge. In his first film role, Burt Reynolds stars as a gun runner eager to escape a Sudanese town who hooks up with a mysterious couple searching for sunken treasure; also in the cast are Barry Sullivan of Forty Guns, the delightful Arthur Kennedy, and Mexican star Silvia Pinal. Steloff and his producing partners had such confidence in their relationship with Fuller that before production even began they announced a four-picture deal with him and plans to immediately shoot a sequel to Caine written and directed by Fuller as soon as the original was complete.⁸ Budgeted at $300,000, Caine shot for nine weeks in the summer of 1967 on location in Manzanillo, Mexico—standing in for the Sudan—with Fuller improvising his shots as he went along.⁹ Disaster struck toward the end of shooting, when stuntman José Marco, in the water with a docile bull shark, was attacked and killed by a white shark that broke through protective netting. The attack was captured on film and spawned a photo spread in Life magazine, prompting the title change to Shark! to increase the picture’s exploitation value. After production wrapped, Fuller retired to Mexico City and spent a month editing the film. His cut was subsequently re-edited by the producers without consultation or approval, prompting Fuller to request that his name be taken off the project. It wasn’t, and Fuller disowned Shark!. Needless to say, no sequel was ever shot, and whatever producing deal Fuller had with Steloff and Cooper was scrapped.

Shark! opens with the first in a series of underwater scenes, as a local Sudanese diver explores a shipwreck and then is attacked and killed by a shark. His mother is paid off by his employers, marine scientist Professor Mallare (Sullivan) and his comely ward, Anna (Pinal), who are supposedly on an expedition to collect fish specimens. Meanwhile, an American gunrunner named Caine (Reynolds) is approached and chased by a Sudanese Army patrol on a mountain pass, narrowly escaping from joining his truck in a fiery dive off a cliff. Caine hitches a ride to the nearest gritty Red Sea burg, where he meets the happily inebriated Doc (Kennedy) and the local police inspector, Barok (Enrique Lucero). Attempting to trade his watch for a ride out of town, Caine instead attracts the attention of Runt (Carlos Berriochoa), a shirtless, cigar-smoking child who takes a shine to the American. Doc hooks up Caine with Mallare and Anna, who are looking for a new diver, and Caine and Anna hook up on their own. Caine gets wise to their nonacademic interest in the shipwreck, said to hold $2 million worth of gold bullion, and uses his fists to demand an equal stake. When hired thugs sent by Mallare to discourage Caine injure Runt instead, Doc sobers up to save the child’s life. Mallare and Caine then take a dive to raise the bullion, but as they lift the gold up to Anna, she tosses bloody bait into the water and attracts the sharks. Mallare is killed, but Caine escapes back onboard and knocks Anna unconscious. Barok arrives in a police boat to grab the bullion for himself, opening the ballast valve on Mallare’s yacht and causing the boat to take on water. Caine overpowers Barok and throws him to the sharks, but then finds a revived Anna pointing a gun at him. Anna forces Caine onto Barok’s skip and sails off herself with the bullion, blissfully unaware that her boat is sinking.

Given the dispute regarding the final cut of the film, it is difficult to assess Fuller’s contribution to Shark!. Certainly the narrative bears his imprint. Fuller said of the script: “I liked the idea of making a story where, for once, the hero is really the heavy, the heavy is the girl, and there’s another heavy and you find out in the end they’re all heavies.”10 As suggested in the opening scenes, this is a world defined by a mercenary culture in which people feed on each other and sharks feed on all of them. The theme of deception and betrayal that runs through much of Fuller’s work is the cornerstone of the film, coming to the fore most forcefully during the final sequence, an extended series of deadly double crosses. In Caine there is more than a whiff of the crafty self-interest that propels Pickup on South Street’s Skip, though none of that film’s sexual heat and tender commitment rubs off on Caine and Anna; instead, the primary romance is between Caine and young Runt—another of Fuller’s ornery child mascots—as they share loving glances and fall into each others’ arms after a long run. Fuller’s creative touch is also seen in the development of the secondary characters—always a bright spot of his—particularly the sloshed lugubriousness of Doc, the elder helpmate who serves the same narrative function as Moe in Pickup on South Street, Mac in The Crimson Kimono, and Sandy in Underworld, U.S.A. and the oddball quality of the grossly rotund innkeeper, seen inexplicably in a red fez and an H.M.S. Pinafore t-shirt—a wonderful bit of characterization as rewarding as Lightening Louie’s deft use of chopsticks in Pickup on South Street.

Samuel Fuller (with cowboy hat and cigar) and Burt Reynolds (right) on the water during the production of Shark! One of the film’s stuntmen was killed during a shark attack, boding poorly for a picture Fuller eventually disowned. Chrisam Films, Inc.

Though the narrative of Shark! exhibits continuity with Fuller’s earlier work, stylistic connections are harder to analyze, as the film lacks overall visual coherence. While Fuller’s films do exhibit a range of stylistic approaches—some are more classically constructed than others, some rely on master-shot long takes or constructive editing or a combination of the two—they nevertheless feature visual strategies that are internally consistent, that suggest a formal design or plan. No such plan is evident in Shark! What we tend to see instead are isolated shots and sometimes sequences that are recognizably Fullerian, embedded within visually banal, poorly constructed scenes. Fuller’s interest in tightly framed close-ups and in organizing space through glances is evident on occasion, and the action sequences contain some visual energy. An additional highlight is the underwater photography, particularly the use of point-of-view handheld shots in the opening scene. Nevertheless, Shark! lacks the careful compositions, the subjective experimentation, the weirdness, and the vigor that mark Fuller’s earlier efforts in the 1960s.

The distribution and exhibition of Shark! was as convoluted as its creation, though it ultimately grabbed major box office in the wake of Jaws (1975). Producing the film without a distributor attached, Steloff initially hoped to offer it upon completion to the major studios for worldwide distribution, rather than selling the rights territory by territory.11 Apparently none of the majors bit, and the film was put on the shelf for two years. Finally, in late 1969, Heritage Productions announced premieres of Shark! in Mexico, Japan, the Far East, and at theaters in the San Francisco Bay area.¹² Regional distribution exchanges released the film in a scattershot fashion across the United States over the next several years, rolling it into neighborhood theaters in New York City in the summer of 1970 on a double bill with the biker pic Rebel Rousers (1970) and booking it onto Los Angeles screens the following June.¹³ Without a national promotional campaign and coordinated distribution strategy, Shark! received few reviews during its initial release, though the New York Times did applaud the film’s “oddities” that recalled Fuller’s earlier work. After the tremendous success of Jaws, Steloff re-released Shark! in true exploitation style, retitling it Man-Eater and raking in $2.5 million in box-office gross.¹⁴ When the film screened again in Los Angeles, it was on the bottom half of a double bill with Linda Lovelace for President (1975), but by then Fuller had moved on.

After several years focused on writing, Fuller had his next opportunity to get behind the camera with Dead Pigeon on Beethoven Street. Producer Joachim von Mengershausen approached him to write and direct the picture for the German television detective series Scene of the Crime; Fuller retained the American distribution rights.¹⁵ Working with a limited budget, he shot in English on location in Cologne, Munich, and Bonn with a German crew and cast, plus American actor Glenn Corbett from The Crimson Kimono. A spoof of the detective genre, the film concerns an American private eye who goes to Europe to investigate an extortion ring after his partner is killed. Christa Lang, Fuller’s wife, costars as the femme fatale. Fuller hadn’t been back to Germany since World War II but was excited to work on location with cinematographer Jerzy Lipman, who photographed Kanal (1956) and Knife in the Water (1962), and to shoot during Cologne’s annual Carnival as well as in a number of famous landmarks—including Beethoven’s childhood home. For a man who slept one night during the war under Beethoven’s piano in Bonn, the experience was heavenly.16

Dead Pigeon on Beethoven Street opens with a murder: Charlie Umlaut (Eric P. Caspar), a gunman for an international extortion ring, kills an American private eye sent to investigate the blackmailing of a U.S. Senator. Police wound and capture Umlaut on Bonn’s Beethovenstrasse, setting him up in a hospital. The dead PI’s partner, Sandy (Corbett), arrives in town to take over the case, but is unable to question Umlaut after the gunman hides behind incubating babies, throws a man in a wheelchair down the stairs, and flees from the hospital. Sandy tracks down Christa (Lang), the woman who posed with the Senator in the incriminating photographs, and tails her into a cinema where a dubbed version of Rio Bravo is showing. Sandy drugs Christa and fakes a photo of her with an Italian diplomat in an attempt to worm his way into the extortion ring. Christa reports back to her boss, Mensur (Anton Diffring), a champion fencer, who assigns her to play along with Sandy and discover who he really is. Acting on orders from Mensur, Sandy and Christa drug, take compromising pictures of, and extort an African diplomat and a Chinese trade delegate, only to run into problems with a Soviet commissar who finds his suggestive photos flattering and refuses to pay up. Sandy and Christa develop an attraction while working together, and Sandy reveals to her that he is trying to break up the extortion ring. Christa tells him he must confront Mensur, and the two separate. Christa is enveloped by the throng celebrating the Carnival in Cologne, where she is targeted by an unhinged Umlaut dressed as a clown. Sandy strangles Umlaut and escapes with Christa on the train, but when he goes to pick her up in Bonn her flat is empty. Sandy confronts Mensur at the fencing academy, who tells him he had Christa killed; Mensur then goads Sandy into a sword fight, and Sandy literally throws the entirety of Mensur’s pointy weapons collection at him, eventually cutting off his head. Finally retrieving the negative of the Senator’s compromising photos, Sandy turns to find Christa with a gun pointed at him, demanding the negative so she can take Mensur’s place and continue the extortion ring. Sandy, already wounded, throws her to the ground and escapes, but Christa follows him back to Beethovenstrasse, where she shoots him in the leg. She catches up to him as he crawls away from her, and, apologizing, raises her gun to finish him off. To her surprise, Sandy shoots her with a gun hidden in his pocket, and she becomes the next dead pigeon.

The tone of Dead Pigeon on Beethoven Street confounds many viewers, as the film fully enacts the conventions of the detective genre while not seeming to take them very seriously. Fuller described it as a “cartoon caper,” considering it a lighthearted comedy. He tips his hand rather clearly in the opening credits, presenting the primary cast members whooping it up in Carnival regalia and himself dressed as a clown. Yet this is not a laugh-out-loud film; rather, it is playful in a knowing fashion, acknowledging its fictional existence with a wink and a nod. From the opening credits, to the character names (Charlie Umlaut, Dr. Bogdanovich), to the use of clips from Rio Bravo and Alphaville (1965), the references to The Maltese Falcon (1941) and Kiss Me Deadly, the broad caricatures and lack of psychological realism and crazed killer clown, Fuller emphasizes the film’s nature as constructed entertainment. This is a film, after all, in which the femme fatale is a failed actress and the central conceit involves role-playing and faking reality. Some scenes perfectly balance the generic and comedic aspects of the narrative, such as Sandy’s everything-but-the-kitchen-sink battle with Menseur, while others hew so close to narrative conventions that there is nothing humorous about them other than their offbeat execution. In the latter instances, such as Christa and Sandy’s final double crosses, it is the stylistic presentation that distances viewers and reminds them they are watching a film.

The style of the picture incorporates many of Fuller’s dominant visual strategies while suggesting the influence of the young European New Cinema directors who so admired his work; the contributions of Lipman and editor Liesgret Schmitt-Klink are likely central in this regard. The zooms, hand-held traveling shots through crowds, play with projected surfaces and reflections, jump cuts, rapid associational montage, and appearance of West German art rock group Can on the soundtrack all link the film with the European art cinema of the 1960s and 1970s, and the most stylistically interesting sequences are those in which these elements intermingle with techniques more central to Fuller. Christa’s final attack on Sandy provides an intriguing case in point, as it is structured quite similarly to Griff’s showdown walk in Forty Guns, but with an important twist. As in the earlier film, Fuller uses constructive editing to organize space, initially cutting between close-ups of Sandy’s face or a wider shot of him crawling away and tight shots on Christa’s legs as she follows him. Halfway through the sequence, a wide shot of Sandy lying on the ground cuts to an extreme close-up of Christa’s eyes, initiating a new pair of repeating shots. The dramatic difference in framing between the two provides a jolt, while the focus on Christa’s eyes emphasizes her grim determination; without any establishing shot, we are left in suspense as to when she will catch up with Sandy. Finally, the sequence cuts to a close-up of Sandy’s worried face, and a shot over Christa’s shoulder of her pointing the gun at him. Up until this point, the constructive editing pattern, isolation of specific body parts, and progression of the scene roughly mirrors that of the equivalent sequence in Forty Guns and achieves similar effects. After Sandy shoots Christa by surprise, however, her reaction shot optically zooms in and literally breaks apart, as if her image is reflected in a mirror that has shattered. The optical effect occurs first in close-up and is then rapidly repeated in extreme close-up, until the shards of Christa’s face fall below the frame in a third shot. This is Fullerian weirdness, popping up in a fashion that lays bare the construction of the filmic surface. When you make a movie that gleefully announces, “Hey guys, I’m making a movie, and we’re gonna have some fun,” why not have the femme fatale’s crack up be just that—a crack up?

In this frame enlargement from the end of Dead Pigeon on Beethoven Street, Christa (Christa Lang) literally cracks up thanks to an optical effect, a fitting conclusion to Fuller’s most playful film.

Although Dead Pigeon on Beethoven Street won enthusiastic support in Europe and among Fuller’s growing fan base, it continued the trend of limited domestic release for his films. Emerson Film Enterprises booked the picture into the Beverly Theatre in Los Angeles at the end of 1973 and allegedly at a handful of Midwestern drive-ins soon after; reviews in the Los Angeles Times and Boxoffice were favorable and considered the film within the aesthetic context of Fuller’s previous output.17 The release was so scrawny, however, that Fuller saw no revenue from his ownership of the American distribution rights.18 Dead Pigeon on Beethoven Street played more widely in Europe, where it premiered theatrically at the Edinburgh Film Festival and closed the London Film Festival, receiving rave reviews from the English press.¹⁹ The assessment of the film in Variety after its London screening proved accurate, identifying it as candy for “European buffs” but noting “its facile dialog and predictable shenanigans limit it for first runs.”²⁰ Given its brief American release and the buzz attached to it in Europe, Dead Pigeon on Beethoven Street began to attain holy grail status among Fuller cultists in North America, who saw in it an appealing form of anarchy. The awe-struck review in Take One summarizes the critical consensus regarding Fuller as a brilliant primitive: “This film is so relentlessly inventive and bizarre, breaking every rule of the known cinema, that the question must be asked: Is Fuller a madman or a genius. The answer is: both.”²¹

A Personal Journey: The Big Red One

Fuller’s ultimate attempt at conveying a subjective experience of war was The Big Red One, the first film he made in the United States since The Naked Kiss. The Big Red One originated in Fuller’s exploits as a foot-soldier in the army’s First Infantry Division during World War II. Fuller originally conceived of the project a decade after the end of the war while he was still under contract at Twentieth Century–Fox, announcing in Hollywood Reporter that he planned to do the picture as an independent production in color and CinemaScope after completing House of Bamboo and Run of the Arrow.²² In October 1957, Warner Bros. purchased from Globe Enterprises the rights to Fuller’s original unpublished story of The Big Red One, contracting to have him write a screenplay and, if accepted, produce and direct the film. The studio advanced Fuller $12,500 for the screenplay and agreed to cover the costs of a scouting trip to Europe; if the picture was produced, Globe would receive 20 percent of the net profits.²³

Fuller returned from Europe and completed the first draft of his screenplay in early February 1958. Interoffice communications between Warner Bros. executives suggest Fuller had a difficult time cutting down his script to a length that appeared cost-effective to produce, and before attempting to budget the picture or contact army officials to secure possible cooperation, the studio requested three additional revisions.²⁴ Finally, in mid-March, with the script at 178 pages (one page approximating one minute of screen time), Warner Bros. executives sat down with Fuller to discuss the feasibility of the existing draft. Fuller and his military advisor, Major Raymond Harvey, had found three Army installations they believed could pass for the North African and European battlefields indicated in the script and that could contribute weapons and troops to defray production costs.25 Yet the wide-ranging terrain, three beach landings, references to naval and air support, numerous tank and infantry battles, and large numbers of explosions among troops indicated in the script still caused tremendous concern, and ultimately Warner Bros. passed on the project.²⁶ While Fuller commonly cited the reason Warner Bros. declined to produce The Big Red One as his rejection of John Wayne as the lead—a role Fuller felt ill-suited him—it is more likely that Fuller could not produce a cut-down version of his script that the studio considered logistically and financially feasible.

Fuller’s final 1958 script contains a basic story and narrative structure that remained unchanged through all of its later incarnations, a story of wartime survival told through the eyes of four young footsoldiers and their battle-hardened sergeant as they retrace the steps Fuller took with the First Division. Almost all the primary elements of Fuller’s evolving vision originate here: the circular plot that begins with an accidental murder after the end of WWI and concludes with a parallel incident at the end of WWII, the invasion of North Africa and the surrender of the Vichy French, the tank battle at the Kasserine Pass, the escape of the Sergeant from a POW hospital, the invasion of Sicily, the landing at Omaha Beach on D-day, the invasions of Belgium and Germany, the battle in Hurtgen Forest, the invasion of Czechoslovakia, and the liberation of the Falkenau concentration camp. The story’s key characters are also present, though in some cases in an embryonic form: a WWI-retread sergeant; Griff, an aspiring cartoonist who struggles with killing; Zab, a cynical cigar-smoker; Johnson, a fresh-faced country boy; and Vinci, an experienced replacement who becomes one of the team.

While the core of Fuller’s story is consistent from the Warner Bros. scripts through to the 1980 theatrical release and the 2004 reconstruction, its presentation was initially much more traditional and accessible.²⁷ Fuller makes an obvious effort to at least acknowledge classical and generic conventions in his early script, making copious use of animated maps and discussions by upper echelon officers to clarify the geography and purposes of the various campaigns and to convey the “fighting spirit of the First Division.” The unit’s commanding lieutenant, captain, colonel, and general play prominent roles, and as the plot progresses, members of the unit are promoted until Griff is commanding his own squad. The narrative focus is thus not simply on the squad itself but also on how it is integrated into the Army’s overall objectives. Each of the primary characters is also given an opportunity to sow some wild oats, a common narrative strategy thought to bring female viewers to the war genre: the sergeant discovers a tent full of French-Arab women in North Africa who are drinking and dancing and enjoys the company of one whose figure is “an arsenal of sex”; the lieutenant cuddles with an Italian girl who’s always dreamed of a big, strong man like him; Vinci falls in love with and marries an Englishwoman who previously dated the captain; Griff snuggles with a French resistance fighter, “a symbol of sex even in her rough peasant coat and pants,” saving her from being raped by a German soldier; Johnson sleeps with a Belgian girl who quotes Benjamin Franklin; Zab rolls around with a German countess in a castle; and the sergeant has a romantic interlude with a young concentration camp victim at Falkenau before she dies in his arms. Whether or not these escapades would have broadened the film’s viewership is debatable, but they certainly constitute the script’s most fantasy-fueled scenes. Additionally, extended sequences involving Vinci discovering his grandmother’s house in Sicily, preparation for D-day in Liverpool, the French resistance, the Battle of Aachen, the Battle of the Bulge, and Griff waking up in Beethoven’s house never made it into Fuller’s later versions—understandable omissions, as they contribute little to the film’s central themes or tensions. While the collapse of the Warner Bros. deal was a major disappointment to Fuller, robbing him of perhaps his only opportunity to shoot with the resources that could have supported the entirety of his original vision, it nevertheless allowed him to continue tinkering with the narrative of The Big Red One for nearly twenty more years, tinkering that would produce a more focused, distinctive approach to his story.

After years of hearing Fuller’s yarns about his experiences in World War II and his desire to realize The Big Red One, Peter Bogdanovich agreed in late 1976 to produce his old friend’s picture, taking the idea to Paramount studio chief Frank Yablans. Intrigued, Yablans advanced Fuller $5,000 in “cigar money” to begin writing a new script.28 By the time the script was complete, Yablans had left Paramount and the new regime let the option expire. With the assistance of attorney Jack Schwartzman, Fuller’s script reached the hands of Merv Adelson at Lorimar, a new independent production company. Adelson gave the go-ahead to begin preproduction with the understanding that the budget would remain tight, payment to principals would be deferred, and Fuller would receive a percentage of the profits.²⁹ Early in 1977 Fuller scouted locations in six to seven countries, resulting in an initial budget between $8 and 9 million; then logistics proved a nightmare, Lorimar slashed the budget, and preproduction stalled.³⁰ Gene Corman, an experienced producer of two war films in Europe, replaced Bogdanovich and suggested shooting in Israel, as its varied topography could stand in for North Africa, Sicily, and Normandy. Finally the project was back on track.

Shooting began early in 1978, although it would take two-and-a-half years for the film to hit screens. Lee Marvin, a WWII combat veteran who served in the Pacific, was cast as the grizzled sergeant; Fuller claimed he took to the material “like a hooker to a brothel.” Fuller brought Marvin and a small production unit up to Big Bear in California to record snow scenes for a few days in January, but the bulk of the shoot took place over the summer, with nine weeks in Israel and one week in Ireland, all on schedule and on budget.31 The young actors Bobby Carradine, Bobby Di Cicco, Kelly Ward, and a post–Star Wars (1977) Mark Hamill played the roles of Zab, Vinci, Johnson, and Griff, respectively, forming a tight unit on and off set. Marvin served as their role model and mentor, teaching them to shoot and offering guidance based on his own military experience. Fuller attacked production with his usual efficiency, rehearsing the staging with the actors, planning compositions and movement with cinematographer Adam Greenberg, and shooting master shots and close-ups with generally only one to two takes. During battle scenes Fuller directed with a pistol in each hand, shooting blanks at extras to cue them when to die (“You’re dead! You’re dead!”); an assistant stood behind him, constantly reloading the pistols and passing them over Fuller’s shoulders, so the “killing” could continue uninterrupted. If you didn’t die as directed, Fuller would shoot you again. When Greenberg completed a useable take, Fuller yelled, “Forget it!” and the unit moved on to the next camera setup.³² Production completed in September 1978, with a negative cost of $4.5 million—by far Fuller’s largest budget yet, but an extraordinarily small sum for a project of such tremendous scope. Fuller delivered his cut to Lorimar at what he later recalled as four-and-a-half hours; Lorimar brought in editor David Bretherton to reduce the length to under 120 minutes without the input of Fuller, and composer Dana Kaproff began work on a score. Once again, Fuller had lost control of a film in postproduction, but unlike with Shark!, his personal stake in The Big Red One prompted him to accede to Lorimar’s requested cuts, however difficult it might have been. Once the re-editing was complete in 1979, the film’s cost had risen to $6.5 million.

The Big Red One as originally released maintained the narrative structure and primary characters of Fuller’s 1958 script but redirected its emphasis, resulting in an episodic, abstracted story of five footsoldiers in the European theater whose only interest is survival. The presence of commanding officers ranking above the sergeant largely disappears, and the soldiers’ day-to-day life is isolated from the strategies of the higher-ups or any political purpose. The five protagonists emerge as an impenetrable circle, wary of admitting replacements who will only end up killed. While the sergeant remains as weary but wise as ever and Johnson is largely unchanged, Griff’s moral struggle with killing comes to the fore, Zab appears as a writer closely based on Fuller, and Vinci is no longer a replacement but a wisecracking member of the core unit. Though the sex scenes are eliminated, new bits of weirdness are added, including a birthing sequence in a tank and a shootout in an insane asylum, events that emphasize the ironies of wartime.

The core cast of The Big Red One formed a tight unit during production. Mark Hamill (front left), Bobby Carradine (rear left), Bobby Di Cicco (rear center), and Lee Marvin (right front) relax during a break from shooting the D-day landing. Chrisam Films, Inc.

Elements from Fuller’s earlier combat pictures coalesce into a unified whole. As in The Steel Helmet, boredom is relieved only by sudden violence, action is abbreviated, and no one volunteers for anything unless he wants to die. From Fixed Bayonets, Fuller transfers to Griff Denno’s hesitation to shoot and moves the claustrophobic cave conversations to transport ships. The children of The Steel Helmet and China Gate reemerge in scenes set in Italy and Falkenau, where they are drawn particularly to the sergeant in moments of extreme poignancy. And the bond between Merrill and Stockton in Merrill’s Marauders carries over into the union between the sergeant and his four men, one defined by shared experience, trust, and admiration. Significantly, the didactic discussions of The Steel Helmet and China Gate are absent in the film, as is, with the exception of the Falkenau sequence, vilification of the enemy. Fuller builds in parallels between WWII and WWI and between the protagonists and the enemy, suggesting that all war is the same, all soldiers are the same. The soldier’s job is to kill, and his goal is to survive. End of story.

Fuller’s stylistic approach to the material matches that of the narrative, focusing intently on the actions and emotions of the five protagonists. Once again, Fuller wants us to feel what it is like to be a footsoldier, and so he makes liberal use of point-of-view editing and close-up reaction shots to provide us with access to the protagonists’ subjectivity. Frequently he introduces the master shot and then cuts into a series of protagonists’ close-ups, allowing us to gauge their responses as individuals and as a unit. These shots are essential, as there is little dialogue—especially during battle scenes—and only Zab’s voice-over to guide our understanding of the characters’ mindsets. Lacking the histrionic performances found in Fuller’s more sensational films, The Big Red One relies significantly on small expressions and gestures to convey meaning. The visual construction of scenes encourages us to set aside the larger context of the battles and direct our attention to individual experience; as with the protagonists in the middle of the fight, we register only what happens in the immediate vicinity.

The staging of the D-day landing on Omaha Beach is a prime example of how Fuller telescopes enormously complex military maneuvers into the experience of just five men. In contrast to The Longest Day (1962), which took three hours to depict the D-Day invasion, The Big Red One summarizes the experience in eight and a half minutes. The scene begins with the five protagonists in the water, crawling to shore one by one. While Fuller’s limited resources diminish the sense of realism—it looks like only fifty men are landing on Omaha Beach—Fuller turns this to his advantage by quickly cutting in to the main characters and highlighting their sense of isolation. The waves, reddened by the blood of the fallen, wash in close-up over a watch on a lifeless wrist: 6:30 A.M. Quick dialogue and a voice-over inform us that the men are pinned down, left without air, artillery, or bazooka support. The sergeant’s unit must perform the bangalore relay, in which a fifty-foot-long dynamite tube has to be assembled by hand on the beach as the soldiers crawl toward the enemy bunkers. “I’d love to meet the asshole who invented it,” Zab mockingly says in voice-over. Ever efficient, Fuller uses a limited number of camera setups to cover the sequence, relying primarily on a wide shot looking up the beach toward the Germans from the optical perspective of the pinned-down unit; a tighter reverse angle of the five protagonists behind a sandbar; and individual close-ups of each of the protagonists, reacting to the relay’s progress. The sergeant calls out the numbers of seven men to attempt the relay. As each anonymous soldier goes forward, the camera stays with the five protagonists and we see what they see: every man dies. The reaction shots register their dread, as they know their own numbers will soon be called. Finally, the sergeant calls number eight: Griff, the character who has struggled with his own fear in combat. For the first time, the camera advances into the fire zone with a soldier, keeping us firmly in the subjectivity of Griff. Griff crawls onto the beach, but freezes; an extreme close-up registers his paralysis at the sight of a dead German. A cut to a close-up reaction shot of the sergeant communicates that he knows what is going on, but he won’t let Griff shirk his job. The sergeant fires a round that hits next to Griff as a warning, and again close-ups register Griff’s anger and the sergeant’s insistence. Finally, Griff crawls forward and completes the relay. The unit now has a way off the beach. At the end of the sequence, the watch in the bloody water reads 9:15 A.M. This scene condenses the entire D-day invasion into the experience of one small squad, and ultimately the paralyzing fears of one soldier. Only fifty yards of the beach are seen, and no more than thirty men at a time. No sense of the larger battle is presented, and no sign exists of any Allies or even a discrete enemy. The grand scope of The Longest Day has been massively reduced in scale, allowing for an intimate vision of war that emphasizes what each man must do to survive.

Lorimar launched the worldwide promotional push of The Big Red One following its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in May 1980, where response to the movie reflected the French adulation of Fuller.33 United Artists distributed the film as part of its domestic pact with Lorimar, and $3 million was budgeted for advertising and promotion. UA scheduled a July 18 release in New York, Los Angeles, and Toronto, with the film opening wide two weeks later. Fuller made appearances at career retrospectives organized to accompany the debuts of The Big Red One in L.A. and New York, and he and Marvin traveled to promote the film’s European release in the fall.³⁴ Reviews were almost uniformly strong. Many critics discussed the film as it reflected aspects of Fuller’s past work and personal experiences; typical is Richard Schickel’s review in Time, in which he suggests Fuller creates scenes and then leaves them “to work on his viewers’ minds, as they imagine the memories must have, over the years, on his own.”³⁵ Variety’s rave allows that WWII pictures had fallen out of favor but suggests “intelligent sell should allow film to reach both those who will respond to Fuller’s artistry and mass audiences looking for strong action.”³⁶ Unfortunately, Variety’s observation regarding the fading appeal of WWII pictures proved correct. The Big Red One opened ninth the weekend it went wide and earned only $2.3 million in rentals for the year, a huge disappointment for a film that cost $9.5 million to release.37 Lorimar went bankrupt shortly after the film hit theaters. Fuller returned to writing. His fans began a long, twenty-four-year wait to see his original cut of The Big Red One reconstructed.

Inciting Controversy: White Dog

Fuller’s most controversial project and still one of his most rarely screened films is White Dog, the story of a young actress who hires an animal trainer to “cure” her stray canine, programmed from birth to attack blacks. The project originated with a story by Romain Gary that appeared in Life magazine and was brought to Robert Evans at Paramount, who commissioned a screenplay from Curtis Hanson and slated Roman Polanski to direct. The project stalled after Polanski’s forced flight from the United States in 1977, only to be further developed with rewrites by Thomas Baum and Nick Kazan. In early 1981, faced with possible strikes by both the Writers Guild and the Directors Guild, Paramount fast-tracked White Dog as one of several films capable of wrapping before the work stoppages, bringing in producer Jon Davison, fresh off of Airplane! (1980).³⁸ Davison initially balked at the assignment, concerned that Paramount president Michael Eisner wanted a “Jaws on paws” exploitation film that would be a marketing nightmare.³⁹ Under contract with Paramount, Davison finally relented, now saddled with a project well into preproduction and scheduled for shooting in six weeks but lacking a workable script and a director. Davison contacted Hanson, a former colleague from Roger Corman’s New World Productions, who recommended Fuller, a personal friend; both knew Fuller to be one of the few men in Hollywood who could prepare a script and direct on such short notice. Though already scheduled to fly to Japan and helm Let’s Get Harry, Fuller signed on to White Dog, “excited as hell about doing Romain Gary’s story,” as the writer was an old friend.⁴⁰ Fuller and Hanson spent two weeks crafting a completely new script, with Hanson writing scenes and Fuller rewriting. At the same time, rising star Kristy Mc-Nichol was signed to headline, with supporting help from Jameson Parker, Burl Ives, and Paul Winfield. Operating with a budget of $7.1 million, Fuller shot for forty-four days—starting a month after the script was finished.⁴¹

Midway through production, Paramount brought in David Crippens, the vice-president and station manager of KCET, the local PBS station, and Willis Edwards, president of the Beverly Hills–Hollywood NAACP chapter, to act as consultants on the film’s representation of race. Both read the script, met at various times with Jeffrey Katzenberg, head of production at Paramount, Davison, and actor Paul Winfield, and provided notes. Both considered how African-American audiences might respond to the film in the context of the ongoing serial slayings of black children in Atlanta. Crippens indicated “I do not find the script racist” but suggested clarifying the motivations of the black animal trainer who deprograms the dog. Edwards anticipated unintended readings of the film that “could cause a distribution problem if the Black population were to collectively voice an objection to the subject matter.” He recommended removing the racial content and producing a more conventional horror/thriller film—an untenable option that seemed to completely miss the point of the movie.42 Katzenberg and Don Simpson, vicepresident of production, took the comments of Crippens and Edwards extremely seriously, encouraging the consultants to provide both general recommendations to clarify the film’s themes and comments on the action and dialogue in specific scenes.⁴³ Though Davison did his best to act as a buffer between Fuller and the notes coming from the consultants through Paramount executives, Fuller nevertheless resented the involvement of non-filmmakers, writing on one memo that summarized the suggestions of Crippens and Edwards, “This is why the film was not made for 6 years until I came in with the non-racist approach” (emphasis in original).⁴⁴ Katzenberg’s recommended changes to the script based on the consultants’ notes also offended Fuller, who angrily called the then thirty-year-old executive “Katzenjammer,” a reference to the ill-behaved children in the Katzenjammer Kids comic strip, and described his ideas as “stupid, unimaginative, and insulting,” reminiscent “of messenger boys’ memos.”⁴⁵ Clearly Katzenberg was being cautious, trying to protect the film and Paramount from controversy. To Fuller, however, the young executive paled next to Darryl Zanuck, who protected Fuller’s choices even in the face of complaints from J. Edgar Hoover. The intrusion of outside consultants into production at the invitation of Paramount executives suggested to Fuller a profound lack of respect toward him and a cowardly ambivalence toward the film’s content.

The film as shot is set in Los Angeles, where struggling actress Julie Sawyer (McNichol) accidentally hits a dog while driving home. After bringing the white Alsatian to a vet, Julie is advised to drop it at the pound. Instead, she takes the dog home and puts up “found” ads in the neighborhood, growing increasingly attached to her new companion. Julie’s boyfriend, writer Roland Gray (Parker), is less enamored, as the dog seems to find him threatening. The dog proves useful, however, rousing itself from a TV viewing of They Were Expendable (1945) to prevent Julie’s assault by a would-be rapist. One day the dog chases a rabbit and runs away, prompting Julie to search for him at the pound; discovering the gas chambers, she determines to never turn him in. Julie is thrilled when the dog returns, unaware that it has just viciously attacked and killed an African-American driving a street cleaner. The attacks continue when Julie brings the dog to a commercial she is shooting and he lunges after her black costar. Roland suspects the dog has been trained to attack and should be put down, but Julie decides to visit an animal trainer first. Carruthers (Ives), a robot hater who coaches animals for the movies, tells her the dog is too old to be reprogrammed, but his African-American partner, Keys (Winfield), expresses interest. Julie leaves the dog with Keys, who begins working diligently. One night, the dog stages a “prison break” from its large iron cage and gets loose, later chasing a well-dressed black man into a church and killing him. Keys recaptures the dog and rebuffs the renewed concerns of Carruthers and Julie, arguing for the importance of learning how to eradicate the dog’s racist training. As Keys continues his work, the dog’s prior owners respond to Julie’s ad: an elderly man and his two granddaughters. Julie denounces the grandfather’s racism and refuses to return the dog. At the animal compound, Keys believes he has made a breakthrough and stages a demonstration in the dog’s cage for Carruthers and Julie. The dog no longer runs at Keys in fury, but does threaten Julie, only to respond warmly in the end. As the dog and Julie cuddle, the dog spots Carruthers, and races to attack him, prompting Keys to abandon his experiment and shoot to kill.

The narrative conceit of White Dog was a challenge from the start, as it suggested not simply “Jaws on paws” but racist “Jaws on paws.” The previous draft of the script written before Fuller and Hanson’s overhaul as well as Paramount’s accompanying suggestions for revisions highlight the apparent difficulty studio executives had with initially recognizing the story’s potential controversy. Paramount executives were looking for a “suspense thriller” that featured a “moving and emotional love story between a human and an animal.”46 The female protagonist’s relationship with the dog was intended to provide her with the strength to overcome her victimization by men, resulting in the two becoming a team. At the same time, Paramount executives applauded the staging of an attack on a black pool man as “more shocking, more like a Dog Jaws,” and embraced the script’s “compelling” ending, in which Keys purposely retrains the dog to attack Caucasians, the dog attacks the protagonist, and then the dog commits suicide in despair.⁴⁷ While the Hanson/Kazan script Paramount was developing clearly identified itself as an exploitation picture—announcing after the title page: “This film should have a slight odor”—studio executives seemed to think the dog could be presented as a loving helpmate whose violence is redeemed by self-sacrifice.⁴⁸ That the dog’s violence was targeted at a historically oppressed minority group, and that a member of this group then cynically adopts the tactics of those who most despise him, seems not to have troubled the executives, as love was shown to win the day.

Fuller and Hanson’s rewrite openly grapples with what is implicit in the earlier script, transforming an exploitation story into an assault on the teaching of hate. The redrafting of Keys’s character is central to this change. While Julie’s character remains personally invested in the dog, it is Keys who is determined to save him, to demonstrate that hate is not innate but learned and can be overcome. Julie may be the audience standin, but it is Keys who is Fuller’s moral voice. The overt discussion of racism within the film and the role model provided by Keys invests the dog’s snarling attacks with a purpose glaringly lacking in the earlier drafts. Love is not enough to redeem violence—action is required. Though Keys fails, the suggestion is not that his efforts were naive, but that the dog simply snapped under psychological strain. Like the murder witnesses who Johnny Barrett questions in Shock Corridor’s psychiatric hospital, the dog has a moment of lucidity after his retraining and recognizes his affection for Julie but cannot remain in control for long. White Dog is Fuller’s most complete expression of his belief in the power of education to change minds, an optimistic challenge to ignorance and bigotry. Unfortunately, the film soon became mired in delays and controversy, falsely charged with perpetuating the prejudice it so clearly challenged.

Postproduction on White Dog commenced in the fall of 1981, with rough cuts screened in October and November. Fuller was actively involved in the editing, responding to the notes provided by Paramount executives and agreeing to trim or cut many of the extreme-close-ups and long tracking shots that marked his work.49 Thereafter, Paramount appeared uncertain of when and how to release the picture. According to Variety, the studio reported that the film’s first preview screening in Seattle in early 1982 met with “average results,” although its subsequent summer release in France by UIP netted “rave reviews and medium business.”⁵⁰ Another preview screening ran in Denver in late summer, where 75 percent of the audience rated the picture good or excellent. Still Paramount held back the film. Variety’s June review suggests their fear: “Touchy theme will have Par treading carefully in eventual domestic distribution.… [A] tough sell is indicated.”⁵¹ Finally, on November 12, 1982, White Dog opened at five suburban and downtown Detroit theaters for a one-week test; though no official grosses were reported, Paramount described the reviews and box office as “not good.”⁵² The film went back on the shelf. Requests to screen it at the Edinburgh, London, New York, Los Angeles, and Telluride Film Festivals were all denied. In early February 1983, Paramount announced it would not play White Dog in theaters, claiming it did not justify the expense of release; instead, the film would be made available for video and cable beginning in January 1984.

Samuel Fuller and his lead actor on the set of White Dog. While promoting the film, Fuller interviewed the German shepherd for an article in Framework magazine. Chrisam Films, Inc.

Influencing Paramount’s hesitation behind the scenes was a media campaign to boycott the film organized by members of the Los Angeles chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. “We’re against the whole thrust of the film and what it says about racism,” announced spokesperson Collette Wood.53 Leading the charge was Willis Edwards, now working to create the same distribution problem he presciently anticipated when he initially signed on as one of Paramount’s paid consultants. “The film has major overtones of racism,” Edwards charged. “When you train a white dog to kill black folks, that gives the KKK and other white supremacist organizations ideas.”⁵⁴ Edwards claimed he “repeatedly told Paramount that the film was racist”; while he may have done so verbally, no record exists within correspondence between him, Paramount executives, Davison, or Fuller that such a claim or anything like it was ever made.⁵⁵ Although Paul Winfield publicly countered that “The protective stance of the NAACP and other well-meaning groups is actually a disservice to black people,” the NAACP campaign convinced NBC to drop plans to air the film two days after it paid $2.5 million for broadcast rights in January 1984.56 Paramount freed the film to screen at the Edinburgh and London Film Festivals, and it opened to strong acclaim in London in April 1984. Not until 1991 did White Dog play again in the United States, however. “Holy shit,” wrote Fuller in his autobiography, “if the chopping up of The Big Red One had put a few dents in my resolve to pursue moviemaking in Hollywood, then the lockup of White Dog had totally wrecked it! I was deeply hurt.”⁵⁷ Saddened by the charges made by those ignorant of his work and angered by Paramount’s lack of commitment to his film, Fuller and his family decamped to Paris, where they remained in self-imposed exile for thirteen years. Samuel Fuller’s American filmmaking career was over.

In Exile: Thieves After Dark and Street of No Return

Soon after Fuller arrived in Paris in 1982, he received an offer to cowrite and direct Thieves After Dark. The project was an adaptation of the novel Le Chant des Enfants Morts by Olivier Beer; Beer was a fan of Fuller’s, and convinced French producer Jo Siritzky to finance the adaptation with Fuller attached to direct. Beer and Fuller agreed to write the screenplay together, although Fuller has suggested their working relationship was not very productive and he was mostly forced to go it alone.⁵⁸ Production got underway in Paris and the Alps at the end of 1982, with Bobby Di Cicco from The Big Red One and French actress Véronique Jannot starring. Fuller shot two versions, one in French and one in which the French actors spoke in English; the following May he supervised an American-accented dub of the English version, hoping to release it in theaters that would ordinarily not play a foreign film.⁵⁹

Thieves After Dark is a contemporary love story set in Paris, chronicling the fateful romance of two unemployed youth. The film opens at the symphony, where French-American François (Di Cicco), an aspiring cellist, illegally watches the orchestra from backstage, only to be pulled away by a police officer who kindly lets him off the hook. Later, François bumps into Isabelle (Jannot), a wanna-be art historian, after they both experience frustrating interviews at an employment agency. In a pique of anger, Isabelle throws a chair through a glass wall at a manager, prompting François to maneuver her outside. They share a drink, and she shrugs off his advances; after a frenetic search he bumps into her again, splattering her with paint. Eager François cleans Isabelle up and follows her into bed, where they make love and discuss their lives under the watchful eyes of her cat. After a failed attempt at becoming street musicians, the couple brainstorm how to raise some money. A joke about being like Bonnie and Clyde turns into a plan to rob the three most annoying employment agency managers, thereby netting both cash and revenge. The first robbery proves gratifying, but the second is interrupted by the manager’s young daughter, to whom they reveal their scheme. Keener on the couple than her father, the daughter gives them his expensive pocketwatch, which they fence with … Samuel Fuller. Now flush with cash, the couple decides to rob the third manager, nicknamed Tartuffe, just for kicks, but end up interrupting his voyeuristic perch on the balcony. The manager falls to his death, Isabelle screams, and a neighbor records their voices and sees them flee. Now pursued by the police, the couple borrow the car of the second manager’s daughter and escape to the snowy Alps with cat in tow. François stows an injured Isabelle in the trunk of the car with the cat while he goes for medicine, but a local girl (played by Samantha Fuller) hears the cat and alerts the police. After a brief chase, Isabelle is shot and François returns fire, killing two officers. After returning to Paris, François heads back to the symphony, where he forcefully takes the place of one of the cellists, fulfilling his dream. Outside, the sympathetic officer learns that a witness reported Tartuffe’s fall as an accident, and the pursuit of the couple was for naught; only now, Isabelle is dead, and François has two murders on his hands.

Thieves After Dark bears only a glancing resemblance to Fuller’s other films, serving as a coherent, generic, romantic reminder of his ability to produce a wide range of work. Fuller’s interest in oppositions and irony is present in the narrative, as the couple’s role-play of Bonnie and Clyde evolves into reality in a wickedly unnecessary fashion. In the opening sequence, Fuller tricks the viewer into misidentifying François the same way the robbery victims later do, visually presenting him as a threatening stalker. The camera follows François in an extended Steadicam shot down a shadowy alley, as he conceals his face from a policeman and enters an unidentified interior. Once inside he hides in an alcove, and Fuller cuts from his glance to the lower half of a man carrying a cello case. The visual construction of the sequence and Ennio Morricone’s anxious score prompt the viewer to anticipate that François wants something in the cello case and wants it in a vaguely threatening way. He does, of course, but what he wants is not what we expect. While the staging of the scene thus far cries “film noir,” cueing the viewer to expect diamonds in the case and preparation for a crime, Fuller flips our expectations on their heads, revealing that François’s desire is to play the cello, not steal what is inside it—and the cop outside who nabs him is actually his friend! It is a delightfully well-executed, purely Fullerian sequence. Unfortunately, no other sequences in the film resonate so strongly. (Though perhaps the cat, a favorite Fuller prop, also gives away the director’s presence.)

Fuller’s first film to be fully financed by a European company was also his first in quite some time to receive a cold shoulder from the continental press. When the film screened at the Berlin Film Festival in 1984, scattered boos were heard in the theater, and German critics found it lacking in credibility. In France, reviews were mixed, with some finding Fuller’s sensibilities ill-suited to such a Gallic tale.60 The Variety review found more to like, though it predicted “better results from foreign play dates than possible US distribution.”⁶¹ While the French version of the film was distributed in Europe by Parafrance, it never played theatrically in the United States, and Fuller’s American version never saw the light of day.

After another fallow period in which Fuller kept busy writing, acting, and appearing in documentaries, he was approached in 1988 by producer Jacques Bral to write and direct an adaptation of pulp-fiction specialist David Goodis’s 1954 novel, Street of No Return. Fuller jumped at the chance, as he and Goodis were friends in the late 1940s when both were churning out scripts for the studios and cheap paperbacks on the side.⁶² Author of Dark Passage and Down There—later adapted for the screen as François Truffaut’s Shoot the Piano Player (1960)—Goodis was a moody loner who wrote stories of violent passion, dark streets, and helpless despair. As with Fuller, Goodis was more widely revered in France than in America, and Bral considered pairing the two an inspired choice. Bral already had a script that Fuller set about reworking. The production shot for nine weeks in Sintra, Portugal, just outside of Lisbon, with Keith Carradine and Valentina Vargas as the story’s thwarted lovers. In his autobiography, Fuller recalls the shoot ending on time and under budget; after supervising the editing he turned the film over to Bral, whom he alleges then recut it.⁶³

The picture opens with a violent race riot on an anonymous urban street. Michael (Carradine), a homeless alcoholic, stumbles through the melee in search of liquor bottles. He bumps into a leather-coated, cigarsmoking woman whom he recognizes from his past and follows her back to a fenced-in mansion guarded by attack dogs; crouched behind giant milk cartons, he glimpses another woman, a beauty seemingly locked inside. Michael’s discovery of the ethereal beauty prompts an extended flashback to an earlier time, when he was a successful singer-songwriter with a taste for gold ear clips and long, studded black coats (it’s the 1980s). Scouting dancers for a music video, Michael enjoys the erotic twirls of Celia (Vargas), the stunning woman from the mansion. He picks her up and the two hit the sheets, though she tells him she is already attached. The two part ways, but Michael wants to see her again. They plan to run away together, but Celia must break it off with her boyfriend first. When Celia shows up for her escape with Michael, she is followed by her slimy boyfriend, his muscled enforcer, and the perpetually pissed-off cigar-smoking woman. It all ends poorly, with Michael’s vocal cords slashed and the boyfriend threatening to kill him and Celia if they ever see each other again. The flashback ends, and Michael wanders back to the scene of the race riot, clearly a shell of his former self. Mistakenly arrested for the murder of a nearby dead cop, he winds up in jail and witnesses the police chief (Bill Duke) harassing and beating suspects from the riot. Michael stages a break with a handy water hose but ends up shanghaied by one of the riot suspects and taken to the cargo ship that serves as the black gang’s headquarters. Another inventive escape ensues thanks to a hand grenade and the anchor rope, leaving Michael clinging to the undercarriage of the gang leader’s jeep as it drives to the fenced-in mansion. Now inside, Michael overhears the gang leader plotting with Celia’s slimy boyfriend to stage race riots and sell drugs as a means of deflating real estate values, enabling them to them buy low, rebuild, and sell high. The two toast to the glory of crack cocaine. Michael retreats and informs the police chief of the scheme behind the riots, then accompanies the police to a smoke-filled shootout at the mansion. The boyfriend’s minions die colorful deaths, Celia is wounded, and the boyfriend is taken to jail. As thanks, the police chief allows Michael to shoot the boyfriend’s testicles. In the final scene, Celia returns to rescue Michael from his life as a bum.

With its shirt-grabbing race riot, mercenary view of crime, and gritty urban milieu, Street of No Return appears at first glance to find Fuller on more comfortable generic ground than his previous picture. The trash-strewn, abandoned nighttime streets and raging gang warfare combine the architecture of Europe with the mise-en-scene of The Warriors (1979), creating a strangely anonymous Everycity abstracted from any reference to reality yet firmly rooted in film noir conventions. Cinematographer Pierre-William Glenn (Day for Night, 1973) attempts a brightly hazy, neon-inflected take on the high-contrast shadows that define the noir look, coming closest to capturing an equivalent during the climactic mansion shootout amidst billows of tear gas. Not only the world they move in but also the characters themselves recall noir tendencies, delivering hard-boiled dialogue and operating with a certain aggressive fatigue. Fuller inflects the material with his own absurd panache, ramping up the performances and emphasizing the cartoonish quality of the whole proceeding. The race riot opens in a particularly visceral fashion, with a close-up of a man getting whacked with a hammer in the head; subsequent shots move through the violence in extended Steadicam takes, enveloping the viewer in the mayhem. Perhaps the most intriguing sequence is the police assault on the mansion, as the use of tear gas in the many floors and hallways makes spatial relations ambiguous and increases confusion and surprise.

Despite the elements that link the movie to Fuller’s earlier work and to film noir—a narrative and visual style he is frequently associated with—Street of No Return is his least coherent crime picture. The pairing of Goodis and Fuller simply is not as simpatico as Bral first suspected. Goodis wrote stories about characters whose worlds collapsed on top of them, but Fuller told stories about characters who punched their world in the nose. Pickup on South Street and Underworld, U.S.A. may share the sharp shadows, urban underbelly, focus on crime, and hard-boiled attitude that mark the film noir approach, but they pointedly do not adopt the nonlinear narrative structure and passive protagonist so central to noir stories. Nonlinear narratives serve no purpose for Fuller, and he never used them (except in this film); his protagonists are charging forward, not looking back. While Fuller revised Goodis’s story to create more action and invest Michael with some agency, his character emerges as an uneasy hybrid of the two writers’ instincts. On the one hand, Michael is largely passive, reliant on coincidence to rediscover Celia, meet the police chief, enter the mansion and learn the plan, yet he is also able to summon hidden strength and resourcefulness to escape from the police station and the cargo ship. Primarily he just watches, his raspy, high-pitched voice a reminder of his emasculation. The ending poses similar problems. Film noir conventions lead the viewer to suspect Celia will either engineer a double cross to take control of her boyfriend’s real estate empire or die in the end, robbing Michael of what he wants most. Fuller himself seems more likely to have killed Michael. Yet the ending portends bliss and roses for both, ringing false both to noir and Fullerian tendencies. The pieces of Street of No Return simply do not form a complete picture; as viewers, we are left with a puzzle.

Street of No Return debuted at Cannes in May 1989 and opened in Paris in August, typically the slowest month for French box office. Reviews in France were mixed, with the mainstream press panning the film and Fuller cultists lavishing praise.64 Variety was similarly on the fence, describing the picture as “disappointing as a chiller and especially as a Fuller, though its large doses of action could interest B markets.”⁶⁵ Absent an American distributor, the film finally premiered in the United States as part of a retrospective of Fuller’s work at Film Forum in New York City in August 1991. Though judging it uneven, critics were thrilled to see a Fuller film again. Fuller champion Georgia Brown said it best: “[Fuller] at least never represents existence at the murky bottom—life vulgar life—as tasteful. Lyrical yes; snug and respectable no” (emphasis in original).⁶⁶ Street of No Return was Fuller’s twenty-third and final feature film. He was seventy-seven at the time of its European release. After he completed two films for French television in 1990, Samuel Fuller’s career as a director was over.

As was true of so many of Hollywood’s most seminal filmmakers, Fuller’s later work was marred by frustration and inconsistency. Despite his growing cult status both at home and abroad, he lost control of three of his last six films and saw the limited release of four. For a man who came of age in Hollywood during an era when you could make a picture based on an impassioned pitch and a handshake deal, the long development process and anxious focus on the bottom line that marked modern moviemaking created an alienating environment. Only Fuller’s relentless optimism and love of visual storytelling kept him in the game at all.

His films during this period did yield work of note. Dead Pigeon on Beethoven Street stands out as a reminder of Fuller’s absurd sense of humor and affiliation with the young filmmakers of European New Cinema; beloved by them for so many years, he made a “fun Fuller” in their style. White Dog saw him return to the problem of racism and learned hate, one of the topics that obsessed him throughout his life; both the picture itself and the controversy surrounding it are a testament to his willingness to face head-on the paradox of America, a country that promises so much but often fails to deliver. The Big Red One, the most personal of his films, was his strongest thematic and aesthetic statement of the period, a narrative and stylistic summary of his work in the combat film genre and a personal exorcism of his fight for survival during World War II. In their own distinct ways, these three pictures successfully express Fuller’s dominant aesthetic goal: to startle and arouse, inform and entertain.

Though Fuller never directed another feature film after Street of No Return, he remained busy writing and acting, particularly enjoying a trip with Jim Jarmusch back to Mato Grasso in 1993 to revisit the aboriginal tribe he first encountered while scouting locations for Tigrero, his final failed Twentieth Century–Fox project. The resulting documentary, Tigrero: A Film That Was Never Made (1994) depicts Fuller as vigorous and idealistic as ever, a role model not only for Jarmusch and director Mika Kaurismäki, but for young filmmakers and fans everywhere. At the end of his life, Fuller began writing and dictating A Third Face: My Tale of Writing, Fighting, and Filmmaking, a rollicking and inspirational autobiography that details his work as a journalist, a soldier, and a filmmaker. After suffering a debilitating stroke in 1994, Fuller died in 1997 in Los Angeles, surrounded by his family.

One of the brightest moments of Fuller’s later career sadly occurred after his death, when The Big Red One was re-released in 2004 in a version reconstructed from his shooting script. Film critic and historian Richard Schickel, a long-time Fuller fan, initiated inquiries into the location of the movie’s missing footage while working on a Charlie Chaplin project at Warner Bros. At first, only a few cans of outtakes turned up without accompanying sound, not nearly enough to extend the Lorimar version to Fuller’s legendary four-and-a-half-hour director’s cut. Schickel’s pressure and persistence turned up additional footage, and careful matching to Fuller’s shooting script revealed a significant number of missing scenes could be reinserted into the film. In the course of their detective work, Schickel and Bryan McKenzie, the editor of the reconstruction, discovered that Fuller’s four-and-a-half-hour original cut was likely only a bit over three hours in length—there simply had not been enough footage shot during production to create a picture so long.67 In total, McKenzie was able to return twenty-four lost sequences to the film and extend the length of an additional thirty-three, adding more than forty minutes to the running time. The new material returned some sex to the film; added ironic counterpoints and scenes of absurdity characteristic of Fuller; strengthened the parallel established between the Sergeant and his German counterpart, Schroeder; and included previously unseen cameos of Fuller as a war correspondent and Christa Lang as a double-crossing German countess. The film’s characters are developed more deeply, while its themes emerge more clearly. In addition to reinserting cut footage, the reconstruction involved a digital restoration of all visual material, cleaning dirt and scratches from each frame, and a complete sound restoration, combining fresh effects and musical cues with the old to produce a deeper, denser, more resonant soundtrack. Finally, The Big Red One achieved a shape and sound that reflected Fuller’s original vision, a fitting tribute to a filmmaker who struggled so hard in his later years to simply get his pictures up on the screen.