Hit! (1973, Sidney J. Furie)

Hit! is multiple movies all at once. It’s a heist procedural, with Billy Dee Williams putting together an unlikely crew of experts to take out the Marseille heroin syndicate. It’s a rogue secret agent movie—Williams’s boss, a profoundly under-cast Norman Burton, doesn’t want him showing up the U.S. government by taking out the bad guys. It’s a muted, detached character drama; Williams is after the Marseille gang because his teenage daughter died from a heroin overdose, and he’s willing to do whatever it takes to avenge her, even as it makes him a much worse person. It’s an anti-drug movie, though very careful to humanize the addict. Astoundingly problematic humanizing, but the effort is sincere. It’s anti-lesbian. There’s a little homophobia with Richard Pryor doing an impression, but there’s a lot of anti-lesbian stuff (his impression involves making fun of lesbians). One of the villains is a woman who forces herself on various unwilling but terrified young ladies. It’s exceptionally anti-French. All of the French people—except maybe the evil lesbian—are gluttonous caricatures.

And, finally, it’s a McDonald’s commercial. There’s not just McDonald’s product placement; one of the characters frequently laments the lack of good Mickey D’s in France.

As a heist procedural, Hit!’s exceptional. Director Furie has this great device to show where Williams is going (he’s got to travel the continental United States to put together his team), always showing a license plate in the establishing shot. The first seventy or eighty minutes is Williams putting the team together. In addition to Pryor—an underwater demolitions expert whose (way too young) wife was murdered by a junkie—there are another six team members. It ought to be seven more team members, but Hit! wants all the heist details to be surprises, so we never find out how Williams adjusts when fate changes his plans.

There’s sniper, Renaissance man, racist, and drug smuggler Paul Hampton. Hit! takes full advantage of the Vietnam War allowing for various demographics to have the types of skills Williams needs. Hampton and Pryor are both Vietnam veterans, though there’s no bonding between those two. Hampton does appear to bond with San Francisco tough cop Warren J. Kemmerling, the surveillance man. Gwen Welles is an Ivy League French club superstar turned working girl and—more importantly—functioning heroin addict, which Williams leverages for her participation. Everyone else has a relevant heist skill; Welles apparently is just a fetching young woman who speaks French. She falls for Williams, who’s got no time for love (much less with a heroin addict).

Lastly, there’s older adult couple Janet Brandt and Sid Melton. They have a very particular set of skills but have gone straight and are running a lunch counter. Their son recently died from an overdose. Hit!’s got a lot of good acting, but Brandt and Melton get to show the most heart. They’re lovable. Even though Pryor’s likable, relatable, and sometimes adorable, he’s not lovable in the same way. Welles is very sympathetic, especially as Williams tries to motivate her through cruelty, but she’s not lovable. Hampton’s always a prick. Kemmerling’s fun, albeit a piece of shit cop (the film’s careful to only show him roughing up white hippies, who are all into heroin anyway).

And then Williams. It’s a fantastic lead performance from Williams. He manages to survive all the silliness the film throws at him, which mostly involves CIA boss Burton sending goons after him. Zooey Hall and Todd Martin play the goons. They’re assholes but amusing (purposefully), while Burton’s a lukewarm dishrag. They really missed their chance on the stunt cast. But Williams also has the worst third act heist action. Heist with an asterisk; they’re all on assassination runs (the film’s not shy about a Godfather nod either). Williams gets the silliest, least dramatic one. While Argyle Nelson Jr.’s editing is sublime, cutting between subplots, even he can’t compensate for Williams’s heist focus being so inert.

Technically, the film’s phenomenal. Furie and cinematographer John A. Alonzo do gorgeous work. Everything’s exceptionally deliberate and thoughtful during the setup and training phases of the film, while the conclusion—set in Marseille—is hurried. There are occasional shades of the earlier quiet, but once the action starts, it never lets up. Until the ill-advised epilogue.

Great music from Lalo Schifrin. It occasionally seems like it’s not fitting—Schifrin’s almost always doing a score for the drama, particularly with the various members of the gang—but it always works out thanks to Furie. Furie also does an outstanding job with the actors, particularly Williams, but also Pryor, Welles, and—of course—Brandt.

Hit!’s got a rocky finish, but it’s an excellent, distinctive picture.

Shock Corridor (1963, Samuel Fuller)

Writer, director, and producer Fuller ends Shock Corridor’s main plot so quickly, it’s like he’s in a hurry to get to the epilogues. Except the epilogues are where Corridor falls flat and doesn’t have the time to get back up. As the film progresses, Fuller makes some significant achievements and builds up such an incredible momentum it seems impossible he’ll run out of speed.

Sadly, he does. Shock Corridor pulls Fuller in just too many directions and he goes with a genre standard. Or at least a genre reliable. Corridor—at the start, anyway—is a film noir. Lead Peter Breck narrates the opening in the past tense; later, he’ll narrate in the present. It doesn’t really matter; the narration’s not successful, but Fuller proves it necessary, so it’s then becomes more tolerable. There is a move Fuller misses for the narration, which is a bummer because it literally would tie the movie together.

The first thirty or so minutes is about reporter Breck trying to convince girlfriend Constance Towers to go along with his scheme to get himself committed to the state mental hospital so he can catch a murderer and win the Pulitzer Prize. He forgets to mention he’s not going to just any state mental hospital, but the one with the celebrity patients. There’s some talk about how well Breck has researched the people he needs to interview inside the hospital, but they turn out to be so famous they’d have been on a magazine cover.

Towers thinks it’s too dangerous, not to mention illegal. Not to mention gross. Breck, his boss Bill Zuckert, and Zuckert’s war buddy turned psychiatrist whistleblower Philip Ahn want Towers to pretend she and Breck are siblings and he’s been coming on to her for years. When she’s finally had enough, she’ll report him, he’ll get hauled off to the mental hospital because it’s 1963, and even though everyone acknowledges men are dangerous to women… sometimes the ladies are really asking for it.

Ew. Also, that detail should come up in the plot and doesn’t, which is a big problem with the film heading into the third act. So when Fuller’s able to right the ship, it’s magnificent. He paces it just right, leverages Breck just right—despite Brock’s sometimes omnipresent narration, he’s far better at the brooding physical stuff—and we’re almost home.

Then wipeout when Fuller dumps treating Towers like a real character. At least she’d been the de facto protagonist for the first act, some of the second. Doing right by her would’ve made up for her always getting the shit end of the stick in Corridor. When she balks at going through with the plan, Breck reminds her she works in a strip club, and so she can’t talk. We then see Towers’s performance, which is a torch singer nightclub number, while she strips off pieces of her skimpy outfit and undulates absurdly. Once hospitalized, Towers in the skimpy outfit will become the angel (and devil) on his shoulder, superimposed, imagined, objectified. Meanwhile, the real Towers is trying to convince newspaper editor Zuckert to pull Breck out, especially after his doctor—an unfortunately middling John Matthews—calls Towers to interview her about her and Breck’s fake family relationship.

All while Towers is going to visit Breck, and they paw each other.

It’s a mess.

But it’s near perfection when Fuller gets going with the procedural—well into the second act. Fuller hammers in big ideas, does fantastic callbacks, and all while basically presenting a jingoistic patriarchal worldview with some very problematic beliefs about mental health. Because Shock Corridor isn’t about Breck’s Pulitzer dreams or Towers’s skimpy outfits (though it is, obviously, it very much is about her skimpy outfits; Fuller worked hard to make up reasons for her to be in them). Anyway. It’s about these three patients and how they’ve been experiencing modern life.

First is James Best. He’s the only one we meet in the first act. The other two actors were busy when they were shooting those crowd shots and what not. Best initially presents as a Southerner who can’t get over the Civil War (shocker), but then it turns out he’s a Korean War vet who defected to the Soviets. See, his parents had raised him to be a racist Southern shit, but then something happened in the war, and he realized it was bullshit and he was being patriotic wrong, so he became a defector. And a worldwide celebrity.

Until he meets Lee Marvin from The Big Red One. Kind of seriously. There’s not not a Sam Fuller connected universe.

Best’s low okay. Until Hari Rhodes shows up, Corridor’s acting peaks aren’t particularly considerable, so low okay isn’t bad. It also gives Breck one of his first good brooding scenes when he’s got to listen but not narrate. Since we get so little about Breck’s state of mind—the question from scene one is will Breck go insane after being institutionalized—scenes where he’s got to reflect are great. And too rare, especially since he’s got a tedious “cat got your tongue” subplot in the third act to delay things for dramatic purposes.

But even with Best just being better than expected, the content’s unexpected. Shock Corridor spends the first act trying to be lurid without being too lewd. The second act is about white racists coming to terms with imperialism (sort of), followed by a Black man (Rhodes) driven insane due to the pressure of being the only Black student at a hostile Southern university, then a nuclear physicist who knows all the times we’ve averted nuclear destruction.

Gene Evans plays the physicist and ends up being Corridor’s biggest successful swing, which is something because the way Rhodes’s mental illness presents is he thinks he’s a white Klan member who wants to lynch Black people. The staff at the integrated hospital know Rhodes is a threat to the other patients but only acknowledge it after Rhodes has attacked someone. It’s a big logic hole.

Rhodes is also absolutely spellbindingly phenomenal. Even when Fuller’s script sends him a particular curveball. Usually, within a couple of lines, Rhodes has made the outlier seem foundational to his character. He consumes it. Rhodes raises Corridor to another level. With this performance in this part, it’s clear Fuller’s more ambitious.

And he makes the Evans thing work.

And action finale.

He totally fumbles the finish. The last story to tell would be Towers’s. And then Fuller takes then that acknowledgment away while leaving another thread visibly untied.

But Corridor’s often a glorious success.

Rhodes is the hands-down best, followed by Evans, then Towers. Zuckert’s good but barely in it. Larry Tucker’s great as another patient.

Great black and white photography from Stanley Cortez throughout. Jerome Thoms’s editing is less consistent, usually thanks to Fuller’s lack of coverage. It gets really good for much of the second act, then also takes a hit for the conclusion.

Shock Corridor’s outstanding. Disappointing as all hell but outstanding.

The Naked Kiss (1964, Samuel Fuller)

The Naked Kiss is an exceptional motion picture. However, it’s never not without its problems: it’s an astoundingly classy exploitation picture about an ex-prostitute (Constance Towers) who tries going straight, only to discover the other side of the tracks just hides their secrets in different places.

The film will also explore the lack of honor (and humanity) among thieves and just how low cops will go, all while reinforcing the cops and “moral” society as worthy and everyone else as lost. Since Kiss is a character study of Towers, one could say writer, producer, and director Fuller’s message is believe women… except it turns out most women lie. Fuller’s not subtle about the message—Towers gets at least two monologues about it, while copper Anthony Eisley gets one—though I suppose the film does technically pass the Bechdel Test. Albeit due to censoring the language.

Other side of the tracks town madam Virginia Grey has “bonbon girls,” which also gives Fuller a couple opportunities to clarify in dialogue they’re not really talking about bonbons. Once the film hits the final third—Kiss is almost equally split into thirds. The first third is about Towers arriving in a small city and becoming a nurse’s aide at the local children’s hospital. The second third is about Towers’s romance with town hero Michael Dante, which is complicated by Towers’s general past as well as her single trick in town—with copper Eisley (the film’s hero who tests out all the traveling sex workers before setting them up at Grey’s, where he visits them for bonbons, presumably). The final third is Towers in trouble, learning just because Dante and the town accepted her, they might not have done it for the right reasons.

Of course, the film opens two years before the main action, with Towers beating the crap out of her pimp (a profoundly smarmy Monte Mansfield) before revealing she’s been wearing a wig and is shaved bald. The opening titles are set over Towers calmly getting her makeup on while Mansfield wallows on the floor. Kiss is never quite as in-your-face exploitation again, but Fuller never lets the audience forget where the film started.

Fuller breaks the story into vignettes, separated by fades out, which lets him establish Towers’s new persona in town offscreen. Eisley’s initially convinced Towers is doing it as some kind of weird gag—how could a sex worker want to work with kids with terrible injuries and diseases, even though everyone at the hospital says she’s a godsend. They’re all a bunch of ladies, too; they don’t know things like Eisley. Eisley’s worlds colliding changes the direction of the film in the third act, and even though it is offscreen, too, it’s clearly momentous.

Eisley’s okay. He’s a little flat, which helps since his character’s despicable, but once it’s clear he’s fallen for Towers, there’s a nice bit of depth to his actions. Especially once he’s de facto competing with Dante, who not only saved Eisley’s life in Korea but is also a millionaire who can promise Towers the world.

Kiss is rather low budget, so the world is just film strips and stylized daydream sequences. Until the second half, when Fuller can’t stop beating the drum on how Towers is only worthwhile because she got out of the bad life and everyone else there is too vile or dumb to save, it really seems like Kiss’s low-budget is going to be its Achilles Heel. While Eisley’s just a little flat, it clearly could’ve been a bigger name. Towers, too—though she’s phenomenal, so you don’t really want to see anyone else there. But then there’s Dante. Fuller’s got a lot of character actors in the supporting roles, sometimes making the thin parts more substantial, sometimes not (though usually because of the moralizing). But Dante’s usually just plain not good. He’s never terrible, but he’s sometimes bad, and he’s never any good. Watching Towers hoist their scenes up over and over looks exhausting.

Towers and Fuller are Kiss’s big achievers. He gives her a great part, problematic as it might be, and she’s outstanding. Even when she’s got to do something silly, she makes it work. It’s a superior performance. And Fuller’s direction is singular too. He uses these smash cuts to second-person shots; the camera—sometimes Towers, sometimes not—peering into someone’s face. It’s particularly devastating with the sick kids, who have an initially adorable, then infinitely macabre musical number. However, Fuller’s careful to empathize with the kids. He’s making an exploitation picture, sure, but it’s more a melodrama, after all–a didactic one at that.

Every ten to fifteen minutes—the film runs ninety—Fuller has one visually dynamic sequence or another. There’s a phenomenal synergy to the whole thing. He amps up the melodrama either through Towers’s experience of the narrative or through masterful visceral visual scenes. Great stuff.

Fuller’s crew is excellent; Stanley Cortez’s moody black and white photography is crucial, and, outside the times they reshot something but from the exact same setup, and he couldn’t cut to match, excellent editing from Jerome Thoms. Fuller, Thoms, Cortez, and composer Paul Dunlap set Kiss’s tone fast and strong while still leaving themselves room to flex throughout.

Naked Kiss has problems—heaps and heaps—but it’s one hell of a picture. And Towers is sublime.

The Crimson Kimono (1959, Samuel Fuller)

The most gracious explanation for The Crimson Kimono’s politics are it takes place in a universe where the U.S. didn’t concentrate 125,000 plus American citizens in camps during World War II. Even in that universe, there are problems, like white people Glenn Corbett and Victoria Shaw gaslighting Asian guy James Shigeta about his ability to perceive racism. Short answer: he can’t, and he’s projecting his own feelings of inadequacy (for not being white) on others. Then a bunch of the movie is just about white over the age of thirty not being able to compete with coeds and strippers for men’s attention, which is the true validation.

Except for that metric shit ton of worms, Crimson Kimono’s pretty great, actually. It’s director Fuller with a crane, tracking shots, and location shooting in L.A. He loves it. He also loves showcasing the Japanese culture as it exists in L.A. He even lets it get ahead of him, like when he lets an actual Buddhist reverend (Ryosho S. Sogabe) act in addition to performing a ceremony. The ceremony’s for Bob Okazaki’s son, who received a posthumous Medal of Honor in the Korean War (there was one Nisei soldier who did at the time; it took the military until 2000 to award the rest). It’s a lovely sequence, even if it’s a bunch of icky propaganda. Ditto the Big Red One recruiting poster in Little Tokyo.

The film starts as a streamlined police procedural. Stripteaser Gloria Pall does her number, goes backstage, and finds a gunman waiting in her dressing room. The gunman chases her out onto the street, where he shoots Pall dead. The cops show up—Corbett and Shigeta—and while interviewing Pall’s manager (a fantastic Paul Dubov), discover she’d been working on a Japanese culture-influenced act… The Crimson Kimono.

The act involves someone breaking bricks before Pall strips. Shigeta goes to find that guy while Corbett tracks down the artist of Pall’s portrait in the kimono. The opening titles are a time-lapse of the portrait being painted, so it all wraps together very nicely. Again, Fuller directs the heck out of Kimono.

Thanks to the Skid Row Michelangelo Anna Lee, Corbett discovers the artist is a fetching coed (Shaw). While he’s trying to get her to identify their prime suspect through sketches and mug books, Shigeta tracks down Pall’s stage partner for the new act, George Yoshinaga. Yoshinaga’s a delight. So’s Lee, but Lee’s a delight because of her performance and the script; Yoshinaga’s a delight because he clearly loves being in a movie. There are a few other background actors who also clearly think it’s a hoot, but Yoshinaga’s got the most significant part.

Except then Corbett puts Shaw’s sketch of the suspect on the news, making her a target, so she needs to move in with them.

Oh, right. In a bold narrative efficiency, Fuller’s script makes Corbett and Shigeta roommates. At a hotel. They were in the Korean War together; Corbett, the white sergeant in a Nisei unit, and Shigeta the guy who saved his bacon. Now they’re L.A. detectives; Shigeta’s trying to make sergeant, but it’s a strange red herring subplot—everyone forgets about it about four seconds after it comes up. But they spend all their money living in a nice enough hotel suite, splurging on room service every once in a while (though it sounds like every day).

When Shaw’s in danger, they move her in with them. But don’t worry about it being untoward; even though Corbett very much uses the close quarters to put the moves on her, they’re going to bring in Lee to chaperone. And supposedly the rest of the suite’s full of plainclothes cops (we never see any).

Having all the characters together means Fuller doesn’t have to go anywhere to get the love triangle going—Shaw goes for soulful Shigeta instead of pretty boy lothario Corbett (who’s such a man slut even the local nuns have the hots for him)—but also Lee’s around to offer womanly advice to Shaw when needed.

Awesome efficiency and kind of a great idea for a TV show, albeit it one with racial gaslighting and intense copaganda.

The acting’s all decent with asterisks. Except Lee; she’s just great. Corbett’s playing a few years older (check the gray streaks), which doesn’t quite work. He’s blandly good-looking, blandly charming, but not in bad ways. Shigeta gets to do more, but often against amateur actors. Not to mention the eventual gaslighting. Shaw’s fine, though given how Corbett possessively paws her without her reacting, it’s low-key terrifying imagining what the movie thinks her life is usually like when she’s not a police witness.

Great black and white photography from Sam Leavitt, occasionally, forgivably bad cutting from Jerome Thoms (Fuller was shooting amateur actors and locations without filming permits, I’m sure the footage was a delight). Fine music from Harry Sukman. It’s a good-looking, extremely inventive low budget production. Fuller and Leavitt luxuriate in those long tracking shots.

Fun uncredited bit part from “Batman” police chief Stafford Repp.

Crimson Kimono’s problematic in the extremis, but also a darn good picture.

House of Bamboo (1955, Samuel Fuller)

I had a variety of ways I was going to open this post. I was going to make a Robert Palmer reference for my apparent target demographic (it would have read: Director Fuller has cranes and knows how to use them). Except it turns out… Fuller didn’t have a dozen cranes roaming the Tokyo streets. He shot it on a minimal budget for locations, and the city shots were done guerilla without permits. It’s okay, though, I think. The thank you to the Tokyo cops might’ve been bribes.

But I also thought about talking about the film as a relic from the past. It’s a crime saga set in post-war Japan, filmed on location. Also, on some very elaborate sets on sound stages, where Fuller presumably does get to use his flock of cranes (to excellent effect; he directs the hell out of Bamboo). It opens with Jack Webb-lite narration describing how military policing works in Japan, initially following American army captain Brad Dexter and Japanese official Sessue Hayakawa. They’re investigating a train robbery at first, and then the story jumps a few months, so there can be more narration when stickup artist Biff Elliot’s shot with the same gun used in the opening robbery.

Oh, yeah, there’s a big train robbery opening, with Fuller and cinematographer Joseph MacDonald taking full advantage of the wide, glorious CinemaScope frame.

Then the action cuts ahead a few more weeks with Robert Stack arriving. He’s Elliot’s pal from the service and just out of jail. He thinks Elliot’s got a gig for him, except Elliot’s dead, and his widow (Shirley Yamaguchi) didn’t know he was a crook until she read it in the paper.

Now, Stack thinks white guy Elliot is ashamed of Japanese wife Yamaguchi because he kept her a secret from everyone. Except it’s actually because the other Japanese women are shitty to Yamaguchi for marrying a white guy. The way it’s presented, with Yamaguchi the victim of bigotry on her man’s account, seems to be telling American women if they’re racist to their husband’s buddy’s war bride, they’re being as bad as a Japanese woman.

Also, Yamaguchi talks about how Americans could have no idea how the social pressure works… even though interracial marriages were still illegal. It’s peculiar. Bamboo’s very pro-Japan (well, pro-American colonization project Japan), but Fuller’s also sympathetic to particular plights (who wouldn’t want a wife “taught since childhood” to dote on her husband) and seemingly oblivious to others.

His obliviousness is a blessing at times, however. He made it through making the movie with Stack in the lead. The only thing worse than Stack playing tough guy is Stack playing sensitive romantic. See, he’s going to fall in love with widow Yamaguchi… at the same time, he’s asking her to pose as his squeeze to help him infiltrate Elliot’s gang.

Robert Ryan leads the gang. Ryan is mic-drop fantastic. No notes. Even when he seems to jump the shark, it’s to build up to something else later. Rising action is unfortunately rare in Bamboo too; only Ryan gins up enough momentum.

The supporting cast runs hot and cold. Yamaguchi’s okay in an endlessly problematic part and not bad opposite Stack, which is an achievement. She’s barely in the third act, though, because the movie has to acknowledge she and Stack aren’t ever going to kiss, so what’s the point?

Cameron Mitchell plays the second-in-command, who Stack inadvertently starts to replace, further engaging Mitchell. Mitchell’s great. Bamboo somewhat compensates for Stack’s wooden performance, with the other actors bringing the heat. Except Mitchell can easily do it, whereas Yamaguchi’s already got a lot on her plate. And Ryan’s supposedly enamored with Stack, but there’s no reason for him to be.

Ryan fills the gang with ex-military officers drummed out of the service for being violent criminals. Besides his lack of affect, the only significant thing about Stack is his ostensibly impressive criminal record. Only Ryan’s not using him for any of that stuff. Ryan’s just another goon. Plus, Ryan spends their scenes waiting for Stack to start acting, which everyone else has figured out isn’t happening.

But Ryan and Fuller seem sure Stack’s got to have something at some point.

Nope.

An uncredited DeForest Kelley also gets to upstage Stack as Ryan’s other named goon.

Bamboo’s a great-looking film. Fuller loves the wide frame, and he loves doing the Tokyo travelogue—including a finale set at a rooftop amusement park—but he’s got no sense for the script. Or at least how to make it with Stack playing it. Bamboo is an eighty-four-minute movie running almost twenty minutes too long. Stack’s a terrible lead in the first act. Eventually, he gets sympathetic because of the plot, but he’s an American bully, shoving his way around Tokyo and trying to intimidate everyone. However, he’s nice to kids, which is a tell.

Oh, and bad music. Bad in it’s from 1955, so, of course, it’s going to be “ethnic” themed. Except composer Leigh Harline one-ups it by going Hollywood Chinese music. When it’s just thriller music, it’s usually fine.

House of Bamboo isn’t a success, but it’s a superbly made film. Fuller does masterful work. And Ryan’s so good.

Forty Guns (1957, Samuel Fuller)

Forty Guns occupies that rare position of simultaneously playing like a parody of itself without being any campy fun. It’s a perfect storm of budget, cast, story, era, technology, earnestness, and director Fuller.

Oh, and it’s a singing cowboy Western. Well, singing bathhouse owner. Men’s only, which leads to a couple weird scenes where Fuller is palpably chomping at the bit to start a musical number and have everyone bust out. Sadly, the musical number never arrives, and instead it’s always just Jidge Carroll walking around and singing with some guy nearby playing a guitar.

Carroll has one song about Barbara Stanwyck (High Ridin’ Woman (With a Whip)) and a funeral song (God Has His Arms Around Me, which is an exceptionally problematic hymn about God gaslighting you after abusing you). They’re awful songs. And they’re silly. And Carroll’s not good enough to make them worth it. During the funeral song, it’s clear Fuller doesn’t have a bad idea here; he just doesn’t have the time, money, or onscreen talent to figure it out.

For the first act, Forty Guns feels a little like Fuller saw Seven Samurai and decided to American-it-up, meaning multiply the title by six and then do an entirely different movie.

Guns takes place in Tombstone, Arizona, where a Wyatt Earp-type (Barry Sullivan) comes to town to serve a warrant only to fall for local battle baroness Barbara Stanwyck. Sullivan’s got his sidekick brother, Gene Barry, and his baby brother, Robert Dix, along, though Dix is supposed to be moving out to California to be an “agricultural cowboy.”

The good guys are there on federal business, so when local marshal Hank Worden (a nice but not good cameo) begs Sullivan to help him stand up to Stanwyck, Sullivan gives him the “ain’t my wife, ain’t my life” and goes on his way. Only then Stanwyck’s shitty little brother (John Ericson) assaults Worden, burning out his eyes with coffee and shooting him; Sullivan decides he might have to do something about it.

The film quickly becomes a battle of the “wits” between Sullivan and Stanwyck, who don’t seem to know when they’re supposed to be flirting or not. Like their first substantial encounter: Stanywck’s got a great flirt going, and neither Sullivan nor Fuller acknowledge it. Later on, she’ll be hurrying through, and he’ll be trying to slow it down. Very strange, though it has a few good moments, which is a surprise since Sullivan’s terrible and Stanwyck’s doing everything she can to be terrible. It’s the part, however.

Stanwyck’s part is as follows. She’s a strong, self-made woman who went from cattle rancher’s daughter to most powerful land baroness in the state. She has forty riders with her at all times (her Dragoons). She dresses like the hostess at an extremely racist Mexican restaurant where only white people work. Her costumes will change, however, like when forty-nine-year-old Stanwyck—who does her amazing horse-dragging stunt in this movie—starts wearing around Southern belle outfits to show she’s in love with Sullivan.

Only they never say anything about her character arc. It’s terrible, it’s problematic, but it’s entirely offscreen because Fuller’s not interested.

I’m resisting looking up the trivia to see if he was stuck in some contract, hated the studio, and didn’t like Stanwyck, so Fuller made this movie.

Most of the acting is bad. Sullivan’s a lousy lead. The script’s not there but, wow, does he not have any charisma. Or the ability to walk distinctively, which is apparently crucial in the singing cowboy universe of Forty Guns. Barry’s a little better, though he’s got a romance subplot with Eve Brent, and he’s older than the actor playing her father (Gerald Milton) by a few years, and it’s obvious. He’s still rather bad. But he and Brent do have a couple reasonably effective lusty scenes together.

If it weren’t for the third act, Dean Jagger would break the movie. Jagger’s the corrupt numbskull sheriff who tries to save the day and makes things worse. He’s atrocious. Ditto Ericson.

Wait, is anyone not terrible?

Brent and Milton are okay, I guess.

Fuller’s good direction ranges from okay to excellent, obviously less excellent stuff than okay, but he’s also got some silly moves and some bad ones. He’s indifferent to the performances and Joseph F. Biroc’s competent but flat black-and-white photography. Since it’s so bombastic, it ought to be in color.

Fuller and editor Gene Fowler Jr. cover a lot in the cuts, but it’s still good cutting of bad scenes.

Harry Sukman’s music is familiar, varied, and tedious.

So, yeah, Forty Guns. Definitely could be in the “seen to be believed, but shouldn’t be seen” pile, but it’s so much comfier in the “what the hell was Sam Fuller thinking?” one.

Pickup on South Street (1953, Samuel Fuller)

Pickup on South Street is not based on a novel; the opening titles have a story by credit for Dwight Taylor, with director Fuller getting the screenplay one. The film’s got a peculiar plotting and roving protagonist, plus some terrific monologues, and I was wondering if they were Fuller or someone else.

They’re Fuller. Fuller and his actors, but it’s his script. It just makes Pickup even more impressive.

The film opens on a hot New York City morning; on the subway. Jean Peters is hanging onto a grab handle while a couple men ogle her. Fuller really leans into the creepy guy bit for a moment before Richard Widmark slides up next to her. They share a polite smile as Widmark reads his newspaper and picks her purse.

Fuller wanted to call the film Pickpocket, but the studio said no.

What Peters and Widmark don’t know is the oglers are actually government agents; they’re following Peters because she’s passing secrets to the Soviets, and one of the agents, played by Willis Bouchey, saw Widmark rob her. Jerry O’Sullivan plays the other agent; he doesn’t get credit (and barely any lines), but he’s very much part of the opening sequence tension. Fuller starts Pickup tense and never lets it slow down. Even when Widmark’s taking a break at one point, he’s got to hurry.

Bouchey heads to the cops, teaming up with captain Murvyn Vye to track down the pickpocket. Meanwhile, Peters has to explain to her creepy ex-boyfriend (a perfect Richard Kiley) about not being able to deliver the package to his boss. He’s been telling Peters it’s industrial espionage, just business stuff, barely illegal. Peters goes along with it because she was a working girl, and Kiley helped her go legit. Though it turns out his idea of legit is being a Soviet spy.

There’s a timer on the delivery; the whole point is to catch Peters’s contact, so Vye calls local stoolie and neighborhood pal Thelma Ritter. She ostensibly sells neckties, but it’s a cover for her information racket. She’s got a personal code for selling out her fellows, an arrangement she assures everyone is understood. There’s this wonderful class tension between the cops and regular crooks like Widmark, then Peters realizing she doesn’t understand how that part of the world works, even if she can navigate her way through it.

Ritter gets the film’s best scene, a lengthy monologue about her life at that point, struggling to save enough cash to ensure a proper burial and not Potter’s Field. Absolutely devastating stuff, with Fuller laying the groundwork for it from Ritter’s first scene. She and Peters will team up later on, with Peters and the cops looking for Widmark, and Ritter wants to make sure Widmark makes it out of this mess okay.

The film’s a smorgasbord of phenomenal sequences, with Fuller taking advantage of a studio budget to showcase himself and the film. Widmark and Peters have numerous sweaty, sexy scenes together as they both try to play one another. Once Peters gets some context for Widmark from Ritter—and once Ritter vouches for Peters to Widmark—the relationship gets even more layers. Unlike the Ritter monologue, I couldn’t believe the Widmark and Peters “courtship” was from a novel; it’s too filmic.

But Fuller’s also got a bunch of action sequences. There are lots of crane shots, lots of long takes with multiple actors, and a couple of harrowing scenes as the Commies get serious (and murderous).

Even with the “red herring,” the bad guys are just greedy bad guys, and Fuller never commits too hard with the jingoism. It’s all talk for Widmark, a three-time loser who’s a week out of prison and either facing a life sentence for picking Peters’s purse or some treason charge; he’s the film’s enigma. Everyone else—including Bouchey, Vye, Kiley—explain themselves at one point or another. Widmark doesn’t; can’t. So we watch the intricate plot unravel and become clear on his face, which is one of Fuller’s best moves.

Along with all the other great moves.

Pickup’s surprisingly serious. Like, it’s got a happy-go-lucky score from Leigh Harline for most of it, and there are some jokes, but it’s not funny. It’s dangerous, and it’s tragic, and it’s beautiful. Fuller, with a budget, is peerless because he’s exuberant about the film, has recurring sight gags for the audience, and invites active participation and enthusiasm.

The film takes place over about two and a half days. First day morning, Widmark picks Peters, the cops start looking for him, she starts looking for him. By that first night, she’s already negotiating to get the MacGuffin back. No one’s getting any sleep; everyone’s bouncing around with nervous and worse energy. It’s a New York movie, too; enough location shooting and solid sets (there’s a fantastic library sequence), so they’re bouncing around the big city, adding the urban isolation bit, which informs the three main characters.

It’s wonderful.

The best performance is obviously Ritter, who’s incomparable. Then Peters, then Widmark. Peters has a tricky part—tough girl stuck in the femme fatale role she doesn’t want to play—and does really well. Widmark’s just got to be a charming asshole who wises up to human connection.

All the technicals check out—Joseph MacDonald’s photography, Nick DeMaggio’s cutting, Al Orenbach’s sets, Travilla’s costumes—Pickup on South Street is an outstanding motion picture, start to finish.

Park Row (1952, Samuel Fuller)

Writer, director, and producer Fuller is very committed to the bit with Park Row. He almost pulls the film out of its spiraling third act with an audacious epilogue, which ties back into the opening, with its (uncredited) narration setting the scene. The year is 1886, the place is New York City, and there live the finest men in the world—the American Newspaperman. Emphasis on man. Row’s going to have some very interesting misogyny, but it always comes with enough to qualify it down to class commentary. Fuller never lets the film be too mean to leading lady Mary Welch because she’s the love interest too.

Plus, imagine if a dynamic, self-made man competed with Welch in business and ideology and eventually won her over to his side. Fuller gets away with a lot in Park Row and it’s always because he’s got the right lead—Gene Evans. Fuller takes almost twenty minutes to give Evans his first close-up, even though the movie’s narration hands the action over to him. He’s just a newspaperman, after all, he’s not the one making the story, just the one telling it. Except he disagrees with his paper swaying a murder trial against the defendant, putting Evans in paper owner Welch’s sights. The film doesn’t precisely explain Welch’s backstory, but it plays like she’s inherited the paper from a dead father and has been smartly trying to make money with the paper instead of reporting the news like an American Newspaperman.

There’s one scene where kindly old reporter Herbert Heyes gives Welch a startling dressing down, weaponizing the cultural misogyny against her. It’s intense and, like one of the love scenes, impressive what Fuller can accomplish given the constraints. He’s doing a costume drama about a newspaper, only he’s doing it as an action buddy picture. It’s not a Western; it’s a North-Eastern. Or something.

At one point, Evans drags a guy through the streets and beats the shit out of him against a Ben Franklin statue because Evans is righteous. He’s surrounded by an entourage who eagerly acknowledge he’s the next great American Newspaperman. But Fuller never lets Evans grandstand; instead, he focuses on Evans’s quiet idealism. Given Evans spends the first ten minutes of the film mostly just mulling over the chatter around him, the quiet bit works. Much better than when Evans starts talking to his newspaper.

The film would actually have been able to get away with some of that nonsense if the third act weren’t such a mess. Fuller douses all his goodwill in gasoline and lights a match in a few seconds. It’s an impressive capitulation; turns out Park Row didn’t have a third act, after all. The first act had Evans setting up the paper with his gang of newspaper and journalism enthusiasts, second act is the rivalry between Evans and Welch (with a great, Statue of Liberty-related subplot), third act is the rushed wrap-up then the film’s Brobdingnagian flexing finale.

Row’s obviously on a budget. They didn’t even have matte painters; instead, the backgrounds down the blocks are barely three-dimensional models. Beautifully made, not particularly realistic. The block and a half set is otherwise exceptional. Fuller and cinematographer John L. Russell frequently weave around the set, into buildings, out of buildings, and they’re having a ball with it. Initially, it plays to the costume picture angle, showcasing the sets and costumes (production design by Theobold Holsopple), then it distinguishes Row from that genre, then it goes all out action when Evans starts kicking ass.

Evans has some incredible dialogue to pass, and he manages it successfully; his performance is spectacular. Shame the part doesn’t keep up. Welch is uneven but rather good at playing sincere and thoughtful, which works to make up for it. She and Evans also have chemistry, even though they really shouldn’t.

In addition to Heyes, Evans’s gang includes Forrest Taylor as his financier, Neyle Morrow as his cartoonist, Dick Elliot as the newsroom editor, Don Orlando as the Italian typesetter who doesn’t read or write English, and Dee Pollock as the swell kid who wants to be an American Newspaperman. They’re delightful together. Oh, and Bela Kovacs. Kovacs is an inventor. Park Row isn’t about a newspaperman striking out on his own and struggling to find the right idea; it’s about the messiah of American Journalism just needing a blank check. The movie and Fuller are rabidly optimistic.

Park Row comes crashing down at the end, but Fuller builds something really impressive right up until then.

The Steel Helmet (1951, Samuel Fuller)

The Steel Helmet is an admirable effort from writer, director, and producer Fuller. However, from the start, it’s clear some of the film’s successes will come with qualifications. Fuller, for example, has a great shot a quarter of the time, a terrible shot a quarter of the time, and okay shots half the time. Lousy shots always come after the good ones to emphasize the downgrade.

Fuller, cinematographer Ernest Miller, and editor Philip Cahn have a terrible time putting sequences together, especially when they’re going from set to location. For example, the climactic action finale looks like it’s reused footage from another war movie; it’s not; it’s Fuller; it just looks nothing like the rest of the film.

It’s not just for the action sequences, either. The problem’s present in the first scene and every one after.

There are unqualified successes, of course. Many performances are fantastic, even when Fuller’s script loses track of his protagonist. The film opens with tough sergeant Gene Evans surviving a North Korean ambush. The bullet went into his steel helmet and looped around, leaving only a minor cut. A South Korean orphan, played by William Chun (as “Short Round,” which is apparently where Spielberg got it from for Temple), finds Evans and frees him. They quickly become pals.

On their trip through Oz, they soon meet medic James Edwards. Edwards is Black, Evans is white, and Chun is Korean. There are scenes between Evans and both new friends about race, with excellent character moments for each of them.

Instead of finding the Cowardly Lion, the trio finds a lost squad. Led by officer Steve Brodie, they’re supposed to set up an observation post in a Buddhist temple nearby. Evans knows Brodie and hates him; Brodie’s a dipshit officer. Evans also knows Brodie’s sergeant, Richard Loo. Loo’s Japanese American; Brodie doesn’t listen to him because he’s not white. Fuller, with a lot of gruff and bravado, drags the racism out of its hold enough to look at it in the light before letting it scurry back in.

He’ll spotlight it later when a North Korean officer (Harold Fong) tries to sway both Edwards and Loo away from the actively racist U.S.A. Both attempts are protracted, and neither comes to a substantial conclusion (outside an awkward scene for the actors); however, it was enough to get the FBI investigating Fuller.

The second act is the squad hanging out at the temple, with Evans as the de facto lead, but the focus widened more towards an ensemble piece. Besides Brodie, whose inevitable “dipshit officer redeems himself at the end” arc doesn’t take up a lot of them, there’s also Robert Hutton, Sid Melton, Richard Monahan, and Neyle Morrow in the squad.

Hutton gets the most to do, though Melton’s the most memorable.

Everything’s generally fine until the third act when Fuller tries taking the focus away from Evans and spreading it out. Then, just when he seemingly manages to widen it, he tightens back in on Evans for a lackluster postscript.

Great performances from Evans, Edwards, Brodie, and Loo. Fong’s a little much—Fuller’s script walks a fine line of anti-Communism, anti-officer, pro-infantry, pro-progressive but armed U.S.A.—and Fong gets the worst of it. The mumbo jumbo also screws up Evans’s performance a little, leaving him in limbo as far as his character development.

Still, it’s impressive as all hell, with a great score from Paul Dunlap, and when Fuller hits, he hits. It’s even more impressive given the meager budget; Fuller knows what he’s doing, but there’s just not enough money to realize it.

Fixed Bayonets! (1951, Samuel Fuller)

About two minutes after I had the thought, “Oh, no, what if the morale of Fixed Bayonets! is ‘it isn’t the generals who are the heroes but the men,’” the film reveals the morale to be it isn’t the generals who are the heroes but the men.

The film opens with a title card establishing the setting and the direct involvement of the U.S. Armed Forces. The first scene has two enlisted guys waxing poetic about how generals are super cool and they could never be generals because generals are super cool. Stuart Randall plays the general. He’s terrible. For his entire scene, it’s pins and needles whether the rest of the film is going to have such atrocious acting. And ham-fisted exposition. There’s going to be exposition later, but it thankfully won’t be ham-fisted. In fact, the opening scene is such an outlier to the rest of the film for a while in the second act it seems like Bayonets is going to end up a dark, satirical tragedy.

It has all the pieces. Leave out some of the patriotic music, get rid of the voices lead Richard Basehart hears (even the good ones), and without making any changes to the edit, Bayonets would be very different. The patriotic music and Basehart’s reassuring voices turn it into wartime propaganda. It assures the homefront the fellas are a-okay, even if it’s more a war than a “police action.” Heck, even the screwups get another chance over there. So it does end up being a tragedy, just not in a good way.

Because the second act of Fixed Bayonets! is phenomenal. Director Fuller is always ambitious with the action. The film mostly takes place at this pass Basehart and his platoon are defending; they’re the rear guard, trying to fake out the Chinese they’re actually the advance because everyone else has pulled back. There’s a big set of the pass, which lets Fuller and cinematographer Lucien Ballard do a bunch of great crane shots while things explode. It’s technically solid—particularly the photography—but it’s dramatically inert. Good pyrotechnics, but a string of booms, nothing else.

So when Fuller all of a sudden starts doing these amazing sequences in act two, after one of the squads has taken shelter in a very convenient cave, it’s a bit of a surprise. And then when it just keeps getting better and better, including the exterior sequences with the fighting and not just the pre and post-fighting scenes where the soldiers humanize… Fixed Bayonets gets really good, really fast, and for a significant portion of its runtime. If it weren’t for the finale, you could almost convince yourself the studio took the picture away from Fuller and tacked on the pro-Army intro. Especially since it would mean Fuller’s not responsible for Randall.

It also helps the acting is best in the second act. There’s no Randall, but there’s also a lot less Craig Hill. Hill’s the lieutenant. He’s not just bad, he’s annoying at it. Fuller gives him a bunch to do and Hill can’t do any of it. He’s mostly in the first act, immediately after Randall’s scene, so Bayonets isn’t off to a good start with its actors. Second act, focusing on Gene Evans’s squad in the cave, is when the acting gets better; the actors aren’t just better, they also have a lot better material from Fuller (who also scripted). Second act is when Fuller starts caring about the performances—and he cares a lot, but that first act is rough and not easily forgotten or forgiven. But they do it. Fuller, Evans, Basehart, Ballard, and especially editor Nick DeMaggio (after a routinely edited first act, Fuller goes on to almost entirely rely on it to create suspense and drama, something DeMaggio excels at executing). They get Bayonets to a great place and then the third act hits and it slides down into the muck. It’s not even jingoistic muck, it’s very specifically redemption through Armed Forces service muck. It doesn’t help Basehart’s performance goes to pot either. Evans tempers Basehart but when they need to do things separately, Basehart can’t hack it.

Some of it’s the part, some of it’s Fuller… actually, Basehart might be off the hook. There’s really no better way to play the recruitment ad portion of the film.

Evans is great. You know what, actually, no, Basehart’s not off the hook. He definitely should’ve incorporated some of sergeant Evans’s Obi-Waning.

But Evans is great.

Michael O’Shea’s decent as one of the other sergeants—uncredited Henry Kulky is hilarious as the third and final sergeant; otherwise the supporting cast is mostly indistinct. You can spot James Dean really easily if you keep your eye out.

The middle of Fixed Bayonets! is a beautifully made film, combining various techniques to slow down and inspect the emotions of its characters during moments of crisis and tension. There’s a very clear change in the film’s tone when it starts, very clear change when it stops. It’s not quite foreshadowing but it does involve the same character. It’s really unfortunate the third act is such a disaster. Even without the aspirational, jingoist finish, the action in the third act is mostly bad too. I guess it’d be worse if the first act were better, because then it’d seem like a nosedive instead of a return to original form.

But when Fuller excels, it’s something very special; thanks, obviously, in no small part to Evans, Ballard, and DeMaggio.