From the Newark Evening News, June 26, 1958.
Producer-director Sammy Fuller will be the first enlisted man ever to be the main speaker at the annual reunion of the 1st Infantry Division, come August 22 in Rochester, New York. The honor is usually reserved for generals, but Fuller’s devotion to The Big Red One has been so uncommon that he was bound to be acknowledged by his wartime buddies.
Like every producer’s office in Hollywood, Fuller’s is plastered with photographs. There is a difference, however. Instead of movie stars and other celebrities, Fuller’s photos are all of officers and men of the 1st Division. There are also citations for the Bronze Star he won in the Sicily landings and the Silver Star he won for Normandy.
Those who know Fuller best say the one-time Hearst reporter prefers to talk about his Division more than his pictures. This is unusual in Hollywood.
“I don’t want to sound immodest,” he said, “but World War II was won by the 1st Division—and ten replacements.”
Since the War, Fuller has made some twenty movies, most of which have plugged his division or regiment. It was easy to do in a war picture like The Steel Helmet, but it posed a problem in such as The Crimson Kimono, a cops and robbers tale laid in Los Angeles’s Little Tokyo, or Hell and High Water, a story of the Navy’s submarines.
And even more so in Forty Guns or Run of the Arrow, stories set in the Old West. “The Big Red One,” as a division, is only forty-two years old. But the 16th Infantry Regiment, one of the components, goes back to Revolutionary days.
In The Crimson Kimono, Fuller shot a scene on a downtown street in front of what was once an Army recruiting poster.
“I substituted the emblem of ‘The Big Red One’ and let the camera linger on it,” he explains.
“But that submarine picture really gave me problems—nothing but sailors in it. Submarine sailors work stripped to the waist, so I tattooed the emblem on one of the guy’s arms—in color, too.”
In the Westerns, he plugged the 16th Regiment by having soldiers identify themselves as members.
“Alfred Hitchcock puts himself into every picture as his trademark,” says Fuller. “I put my infantry division into my pictures.”