Luke McGarry

Lisa Dombrowski is the author of a new book on landmark director Samuel Fuller. She speaks now to Nolan Knight.

Fuller said that some of the most hardboiled characters in his films were influenced by ‘people I know.’ How would you describe his social life?
Lisa Dombrowski (author of The Films of Samuel Fuller: If You Die, I’ll Kill You!): When he was referring to ‘people I know,’ he was talking about his years as a crime reporter. He saw a lot of amazing things. He’d cover murders, suicide, corruption and pickpockets. He went to the morgue on a regular basis and his mom used to complain about the smell of formaldehyde. During the depression he went state to state—all the way to the west coast. He ended up in San Diego and eventually in L.A. where he began to write scenarios to pitch stories to Hollywood. He spent decades traveling and writing on people from all walks of life.
Before he started pitching scenarios in Hollywood, he wrote three pulp novels. Are any of those available in print?
I believe that you can get all of Fuller’s paperbacks online if you search hard enough. An increasing number of the books from his films are in print again. The last one to come out—The Dark Page—was finally re-released at the end of last year.
Fuller’s quoted as saying, ‘A director should write with his camera,’ and his journalistic outlook was a heavy influence on his films. Do you think that his newspaper background defined his signature style?
I don’t think it was the only defining element but it was definitely a large contributor to it. Fuller was a man who was born to tell stories. It was something that he was engaged in constantly, whether it was in the form of a newspaper article or a short story or a screenplay or a novel or a film itself. Even at the very end of his life he was working on his autobiography—telling the story of his own life experience. I think that’s really the defining element of Fuller—his drive to tell a story. He’s frequently quoted saying that, ‘When you open a film, you want to grab it by the balls.’ It’s definitely a journalistic concept and you see it throughout his films.
Many critics regard his style as ‘primitive’ because of his reliance on instinct opposed to standard film-school conventions. Can you elaborate on this idea of Fuller as primitive?
I actually am not a big supporter of that characterization of Fuller. The use of the term ‘primitive’ tended to suggest that here’s a guy who is breaking the rules, and because Fuller’s films have tremendous energy to them, many of these critics said that what he was doing was coming spontaneously out of his head. It’s something that emerges because he’s untutored on the way things are done, so he’s making it up as he goes. What I challenge about this theory is that Fuller was a director who did plan extensively—who worked heavily in pre-production on his films. He had a very concrete sense of what he was going for. He was also a director who displayed, in many of his pictures, a very clear understanding of the classical narrative and stylistic conventions that got him working in the studio era and even beyond. He was able to make movies like Hell and High Water or House of Bamboo, both while he was at 20th Century Fox, which were models of the classical system. I take the concept of ‘primitive’ somewhat to task because I don’t think it fully captures the range of his capabilities and I also think it doesn’t give him as much credit.
His films often confronted controversy—race and gender issues or the shortcomings of American society.
How difficult was it for him to keep making these kinds of films?
You know, it varied. Throughout his career, it often was based on whether he was working with a producer that would back his vision as when he was at 20th Century Fox with Darryl Zanuck. It also varied upon the nature of the film regulation going on within the industry or censorship of the time—certainly during the 1950s and even the early 1960s when the Production Code Administration was still working within Hollywood to self-regulate material before the studios could release them onto screens. There were times when Fuller bumped up against PCA regulators who were trying to encourage him to make films that were less violent, less controversial and more tasteful. After that point, he also faced the individual challenges when he was working as an independent director of just trying to put out movies that people were willing to go see. Sometimes the subjects that he was interested in and his personal take on them were viewed as distasteful and too shocking to really be appropriate. Films that fall under that category would be Shock Corridor and The Naked Kiss. Or simply films that couldn’t be sold—therefore no producer was willing to finance them to begin with. He faced a range of challenges from self-regulated censorship to critical reception to getting the money to put the film on the screen in the first place. Definitely the fact that he was a director who pushed the envelope in a wide range of ways created problems.
Why do you think that his films were recognized in Europe before they were taken seriously in the United States?
I think it had to do with timing and what was happening with film criticism during that era. In the 1950s over in France and eventually in the U.K., there were groups of young film critics who were examining film in a different way than it had ever been examined before. They were looking for distinct voices in cinema that had defining scenes and visual traits that occurred within the picture. In France, in particular, many of these critics were very much attracted to American genre filmmakers who had not been heralded yet. People like Hitchcock, people like Hawks, who were considered to be working in forms which were lowbrow or middlebrow pictures that weren’t necessarily prestige films designed for Academy Awards. Films that were designed for maximum impact—often in action-oriented genres. They were a little grittier. Fuller was one of these directors who was seen as being very raw and having an aesthetic that was somewhat vulgar, and that was something that these French critics saw as really pressing and new and distinctly American. So they hailed Fuller and began to write about him. These writings were picked up in England and eventually in the U.S. by the late 1960s as auteurism hit with people like Andrew Sarris. All these folks really helped bring Fuller to the attention of young cinefiles who were coming up in the U.S. during the ‘60s, screening films on their college campuses or in repertory houses in the big cities like New York, L.A., and Chicago.
Can you tell us about your upcoming screening of White Dog at Cinefamily this month?
This is a film that for many people is the Fuller film that they haven’t seen and are most excited about seeing—primarily because the picture was pulled from theatrical release by Paramount. There are a lot of speculations as to why that happened and officially Paramount said that they believed nobody would come and the film wouldn’t be financially viable upon its release. Unofficially, controversy was brewing around the film with a threatened boycott from the NAACP, who were responding to the perceived source material of the novel by the same title. It was really a sad series of events that led to the film not being very widely seen. It had a short release in the U.S. in 1991 at some repertory houses. It played the Film Forum in New York and would pop up every now and then. It’s historically been very difficult to see theatrically and has been often unavailable on VHS or DVD. Criterion has just announced a release of the DVD version with lots of special features for the end of this year. I’m going to be doing the audio commentary for that, which I’m pretty excited about.

WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY PRESS PRESENTS LISA DOMBROWSKI, AUTHOR OF THE FILMS OF SAMUEL FULLER: IF YOU DIE, I’LL KILL YOU! AND A SCREENING OF FULLER’S WHITE DOG ON MON., JUNE 30, AT THE SILENT MOVIE THEATRE, 611 N. FAIRFAX AVE., LOS ANGELES. 8 PM / $8-$12. SILENTMOVIETHEATRE.COM. VISIT WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY PRESS AT WESLEYAN.EDU/WESPRESS.