The daring films of maverick American filmmaker Samuel Fuller (1912- 1997) were so far ahead of their time that only now are they fully appreciated as some of the most bravely outspoken, politically progressive and visually audacious works of the Hollywood studio era. Beginning with his visceral third feature, The Steel Helmet, Fuller's films garnered high praise from astute critics and writers while continually suffering reactionary attacks misreading the bold messages hurled by Fuller at his audience. A surprise commercial hit that celebrated the heroism of the American G.I. while pointedly critiquing the Korean War and the racist policies of the Army and US government, The Steel Helmet defined a mixture of genuine patriotism and skepticism unprecedented in Hollywood and absolutely key to Fuller’s cinema. Indeed, during his prolific years as studio director in the Fifties, Fuller reinvented popular film genres as lenses through which to reexamine American history, legends and hot-button current events. Whether in his feminist Western Forty Guns or his detective thriller The Crimson Kimono, with its interracial romance twist, Fuller attacked from unexpected angles the stubborn prejudice, ignorance and bigotry that he saw as a terrible thorn in the side of the American nation, radically departing from the middlebrow melodramas that were, and unfortunately remain, the dominant formula for Hollywood social problem films. A remarkable high point for Fuller as both consummate cinematic stylist and crusader for social justice was marked by his two masterpieces of the early Sixties, The Naked Kiss and Shock Corridor, each a feverish marriage of experimental art film and B-noir that delivered unexpectedly angry and intense critiques on the hypocrisy and degeneracy of establishment America. In a now-iconic cameo in Godard’s Pierrot le fou (1965), Fuller declared, “Film is like a battleground”­—and in truth, his films can also all be understood as war films: his antiheroes pitched actual battles or fought against general injustice with a fury and strange courage clearly inspired by Fuller’s own life and struggles as a true American iconoclast in the tradition of Mark Twain, Weegee and Ernie Pyle.

Born Samuel Michael Fuller in Worcester, Massachusetts, he spent his formative years in New York City, prophetically taking his first job as a newsboy on the same Park Row to which he would look back, years later, in his eponymous film tribute to the birth of American journalism. Promoted to crime reporter for the sensationalist tabloid The New York Evening Graphic when he was only a teenager, Fuller roamed the US writing for other newspapers, always in pursuit of the “big” stories that captured the drama and turmoil of US Depression-era poverty, race riots and labor strikes. Fuller’s ear for the American vernacular and his sense of the nation’s deepest contradictions and strengths were rooted in these youthful years as a reporter. Fuller’s talents as a writer brought him, inevitably, to Hollywood, where he found success as a screenwriter for hire while also starting to write pulp novels. Like many brave men of his generation, Fuller enlisted immediately after Pearl Harbor, yet unlike others he refused the safer option of war correspondent, choosing instead, as he would later say, to be closer to “the greatest crime story of the century” as an infantryman and member of the 16th Infantry Regiment, the same unit that had fought some of America’s toughest battles, from Gettysburg to San Juan Hill, and that would now take part in the fight in North Africa, Italy, the D-Day invasion and the liberation of the concentration camps at the end of war. All the while Fuller gathered copious notes and drawings and photographs—and even his first motion pictures, images taken with a camera sent by his mother from home—images and words that would, in fact, inspire his war films and especially his autobiographical magnum opus The Big Red One. That the life of Samuel Fuller was as bold and vivid and inspiring as his cinema was made clear by his posthumously published The Third Face and by the lovely documentary based on his autobiographical writings, A Fuller Life, by the filmmaker’s daughter, Samantha Fuller.

While Samuel Fuller made enormous contributions to American cinema, he remains a singular and wonderfully unclassifiable figure whose startling and complex films continue to inspire contradictory responses. Often described, and sometimes dismissed, as a “primitivist,” Fuller is equally celebrated for precisely his ability to radically simplify and essentialize by writing his films in bold headline form. Politically outspoken during Hollywood’s paranoid years of self-policing, Fuller defied the Cold War mainstream. While his films bravely addressed urgent and deeply sensitive historical and social issues rarely touched by the studios, they were also deeply entertaining, colored by a richly comic vein and embodied in the rhythmic and eccentric argot he invented, a patois in which women are called “muffins” and men are “tigers.” Indeed, like Fellini and Tashlin, Fuller was also a talented cartoonist whose gift for caricature and typage inspired his camera’s love of eccentric and exaggerated expressions and gestures. Although he never graduated from college, Fuller was a deeply learned and astute chronicler of American history, driven by an autodidact’s passion for the deep research that gave his films such painstaking attention to period details. Fuller is perhaps best summarized as, above all, a master storyteller whose ardent love of a good “yarn” gave his films their unique spark of unexpected drama and emotional depth. – Haden Guest

The Harvard Film Archive is thrilled to welcome Christa and Samantha Fuller for special presentations of Forty Guns, the newly restored director’s cut of Dead Pigeon on Beethoven Street, the insightful documentary A Fuller Life and the rediscovered Fuller short, Dogface.