Samuel Fuller
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Shutter Island (2010)
Directed by Martin Scorsese
influenced by Shock Corridor (1963)
Visuals Themes Plot
Watching it, movie references pile up inside your brain: Samuel Fuller's Shock Corridor is in there, certainly, and the cheapo tone poems of the B-movie master Val Lewton.
Grad-level geeks will also recognize the references to Sam Fuller's Shock Corridor, Vincente Minnelli's The Cobweb, and Val Lewton's Isle of the Dead.
It's also an homage to Shock Corridor, a film made by one of his idols, Sam Fuller.
With the creepy and atmospheric “Shutter Island,” the 67-year-old Scorsese cuts a few new notches into his belt: not only is it an adaptation of a bestseller (by Dennis Lehane, who also wrote “Mystic River” and “Gone Baby Gone”), a first for the director, but it’s a mystery-laced-with-psychiatry film, in the vein of “Spellbound,” “The Snake Pit,” “Shock Corridor,” “The Green Mile” or even “The Silence of the Lambs.”
For this distinction, Scorsese hardly needed to have directed Shutter Island, his first movie to fully institutionalize this conditionâ??or, if you prefer, his first to wrestle with the psychoanalytic and insane asylum subgenres, within which Samuel Fullerâ??s Shock Corridor is but the most obvious entry.
In Samuel Fuller 's "Shock Corridor" (1963), an obvious influence on "Shutter Island," the reporter's lover tells him he's crazy to enter the asylum in the name of a good story.
The Platoon parallels are the most obvious, right down to the final shot, while an early scene depicting a recent battlefield was reminiscent of everything from Patton to The Big Red One.
It’s also, intentionally I think, a nod to Samuel Fuller’s war-movie milestone The Big Red One, which similarly placed an anachronistic equine amidst the red-misted fog of war.
He’s trying for the grit and grandeur and surprise of latter-day American war films — Apocalypse Now, The Big Red One, Platoon, Saving Private Ryan, Inglourious Basterds.
Much of Fury hangs on Pitt, and he carries the load dutifully, though Wardaddy’s dicy blend of blood-lusting avenger and reflective soul never fully marry, which is true of much of Ayer’s vision; it never quite registers the true organic essence of men in war the way “alternative” WW II gems like The Big Red One and Peckinpah’s Cross of Iron do.
“Fury” is more like Sam Fuller’s personal war memoir, “The Big Red One” — straightforward, less poetic, an action film with a hint of humanity and history that is fast receding from view.
(This movie also looks like it smells really bad.) Adopting the rambling, anecdotal structure of Sam Fuller’s The Big Red One, Fury works best when it’s a shapeless chronicle of surreal, day-to-day horrors.
The Dreamers (2003)
Directed by Bernardo Bertolucci
influenced by Shock Corridor (1963)
Themes Visuals
Sam Fuller's Shock Corridor, a film that not only inspired the Nouvelle Vague, but also brilliantly challenged U.S. political institutions and moral presumptions.
In the first sequence, before the film has a chance to find its own point of view and its own images, The Dreamers is already basking in the reflected light and shadow of greatness, as Matthew watches Shock Corridor at the Cinémathèque.
If Sam Fuller 's Cinémathèque fave Shock Corridor imagined the inmates taking over the asylum, the early "events of May," 1968, found the audience in the theater becoming actors in the streets.
"The Dreamers" kicks off with the first protests over the Langlois firing, seen through the eyes of Matthew (Michael Pitt), an American who has come to Paris to "study", though he seems to have spent all of his time in the front row of the Cinematheque ("We wanted to get the images first") soaking up things like "Rebel Without a Cause" and "Shock Corridor".
In the scene close to the opening of The Dreamers when the threesome watch Fuller's Shock Corridor at the Cinémathèque, Bertolucci's way of filming the relationship between spectator and image sets it apart from the cinema scenes in the other films mentioned.
He begins with a clip from Fuller's masterpiece Shock Corridor (1963), but The Dreamers doesn't move with any Fuller-like intensity, any of that crackling, pulp immediacy It hasn't learned anything from Fuller.
Overlord (2018)
Directed by Julius Avery
influenced by Fixed Bayonets! (1951), The Steel Helmet (1951), The Big Red One (1980)
Visuals Characters
(The Fuller comparisons are particularly strong in a minefield sequence reminiscent of Fixed Bayonets!
…and in their gruff, cynical CO who seems the lost cousin of Gene Evans’ Sergeant Zack in The Steel Helmet.)
Thus the integrated paratroop unit being dropped behind enemy lines: the squirrelly Chase (De Caestecker); loudmouth sniper Tibbett (Magaro); grizzled vet Ford (Russell, doing his best Tom Berenger in Platoon meets Lee Marvin in The Big Red One); and Boyce (Adepo), the naive young trooper who isn't really ready for conflict, and who mostly expresses this by coming up with terrible plans, or disobeying orders in a way that will probably get him or someone else killed.
The local guitar player serves as the chorus of “Bacurau”—think of Jidge Carroll in Samuel Fuller’s “Forty Guns,” always on the cusp of breaking into the theme song.
While I am again hesitant to discuss the details of the film’s second and third acts for fear of spoilers, suffice to say that Nope may have more to say about the ethical pitfalls of animal training than any fiction film since Sam Fuller’s White Dog; this aspect of the film, perhaps more than any other, will surely be discussed for years to come.
In both films Peele also displayed a love for the classic tradition of B-movies as idea vehicles, like Sam Fuller’s “White Dog.”
They claim to be the heirs of the first Black jockey photographed by Eadweard Muybridge in 1878 (Peele re-names him here), and the wrangling-for-movies sub-industry is an interesting slice of work life we haven’t seen much since Samuel Fuller’s White Dog (1982).
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975)
Directed by Miloš Forman
influenced by Shock Corridor (1963)
Themes Characters
The author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Ken Kesey, was said to have been inspired by Samuel Fuller’s work, and this film seems to back that up.
We are at least spared the insipid attempts of pictures like One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest to preciously romanticize the mentally addled; Fuller's asylum does not become the staging area for any transcendent spirit of rebellion, or any faux-realizations that in a crazy world, it's the crazies who are sane.
Johnny convinces the psychiatrist that he has deep underlying sexual conflicts about his "sister," especially after his "acute schizophrenic" episode that occurs when discussing Cathy (imagine Jack Nicolson's "crazy" act in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest as far more controlled).
En el filme, McCarthy hace un énfasis de carácter nostálgico y casi fetichista en el periodismo físico, el material tangible: papel, pluma, tinta, cuadernos, almanaques, hemerotecas y repisas llenan las escenas de En primera plana de una riqueza analógica reminiscente de otros grandes hitos del cine y periodismo estadunidense como All the President’s Men (Pakula, 1976), The Front Page (Wilder, 1974) o el clásico Park Row (1953) del gran Samuel Fuller, filmes que, además, comparten una visión candorosa sobre la ética periodística, un trabajo que en la más valiente de sus facetas, es capaz de obviar intereses y convertirse en un acto de profesional humanismo, haciéndonos saber lo que no sabemos, pero si llegar a la veracidad de un crimen tan rampante toma su tiempo, aun más tiempo tardará en llegar el castigo, sobre todo para los dueños del mismo.
It’s important to separate the men described in his book from their depiction in movies like Lone Survivor, which is crudely written, rife with clichés, and leaves out anything that would transform a piece of propaganda into a work of art akin to Samuel Fuller’s The Steel Helmet, Brian DePalma’s Casualties of War, or Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan.
Saving Private Ryan (1998)
Directed by Steven Spielberg
influenced by The Big Red One (1980), The Steel Helmet (1951)
Themes Visuals Plot
They Were Expendable (1945) and The Big Red One (1980) are among the best World War II movies ever made, and were directed by men who actually served in the war (John Ford and Samuel Fuller, respectively).
Saving Private Ryan has the budget and the production values, but if you want a World War II story from a real vet’s perspective, Sam Fuller is still the man and The Big Red One, drawn from his own war experiences, is the film.
Note: I wrote the above review in 1998, just after Fuller's death and just before the release of a pair of new WWII movies, Saving Private Ryan and The Thin Red Line.
(If the vast differences between The Big Red One and Steven Spielberg�s Saving Private Ryan, between which comparisons are inevitable if only because of their Omaha Beach scenes, can be reduced to a single issue, it�s this.)
But its story is cast in the mold of the classic wartime epics of the '40s and '50s ("A Walk in the Sun," "Attack!" "The Steel Helmet") -- one more tale of a small, tight-knit unit on a dangerous, character-revealing mission.
(Recall if you will the black man in the asylum of Fuller's Shock Corridor who believes himself to be the Grand Wizard of the KKK.)
Hill leeches the notion of underworld loyalty out of the Pickup on South Street homage (Ronee Blakley in her hotel room) and reclaims his own bit of business from The Getaway (a valise of money in a train) to lend it metaphysical heft.
The Hateful Eight (2015)
Directed by Quentin Tarantino
influenced by The Big Red One (1980), Shock Corridor (1963), The Naked Kiss (1964)
Visuals Themes
The movie’s first image following the overture is a rude roadside statue of the crucified Christ, evoking the prologue of Sam Fuller’s The Big Red One (1980), but ain’t nobody turning the other cheek here.
Es cierto que aún recopila imágenes de otras películas: está La diligencia (Stagecoach, 1939), de John Ford en el viaje a la cabaña y también Más allá de la gloria (The Big Red One, 1980), de Samuel Fuller, en la imagen inicial de una cruz, pero es la repetición de un estilo que ya conocemos.
Those three seemed at once kidding and serious, in the manner of such Samuel Fuller melodramas as "The Naked Kiss" and "Shock Corridor" (see them if you haven't; they're amazing).
Those three seemed at once kidding and serious, in the manner of such Samuel Fuller melodramas as "The Naked Kiss" and "Shock Corridor" (see them if you haven't; they're amazing).
Then there are quotes from Hollywood and British WWII films by Robert Aldrich (The Dirty Dozen, natch), Samuel Fuller (The Big Red One, etc.), Michael Powell (The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp), and Ernst Lubitsch (To Be or Not to Be), for starters.
Some of the movies Tarantino alludes to are The Big Red One, The Dirty Dozen, The Guns of Navarone, To Be or Not to Be, Sergeant York, and a bevy of others.
John Ford, John Huston and Samuel Fuller actually served during World War II, and their war films tend to ring with a certain kind of inner understanding, most notably seen in Fuller's masterful memoir The Big Red One (1980).
Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal tell the story in a series of episodes, much like Samuel Fuller's WWII masterpiece The Big Red One (1980).
Pierrot le Fou (1965)
Directed by Jean-Luc Godard
influenced by Pickup on South Street (1953), Shock Corridor (1963)
At the party (which Godard impishly washes with a variety of monochromes), the only conversation of interest comes from American director Samuel Fuller (Pickup on South Street).
Such a claim is supported with a clever cameo by celebrated American filmmaker Samuel Fuller, director of much beloved classic films such as Shock Corridor (1963) and The Big Red One (1980).
When Patricia rolls up her poster of a Renoir painting (itself a once-removed cinema reference) and looks at Michel through this makeshift "viewfinder", Godard is pilfering the unusual POV shot, intact and clear as day, from Samuel Fuller's "Forty Guns".
Movies ranging from White Dog to Killers of the Flower Moon dared to take concrete stands.
This film screened at the Melbourne Cinémathèque on August 23, 8:10 p.m. © RJ Thompson 2000 Endnotes (1) I have written elsewhere about the film's connections with Bresson's Pickpocket (1959): Senses of Cinema Issue 7 May 2000 - "Pickpocket"…