by ·Comments Off on The State of Things (1982, Wim Wenders)

“Making movies is suicide.”

Watched this right after Ruiz’s The Territory.

Alexander Graf quoted by Michael Goddard: “The story is based on the situation [Wenders] found when he visited [Ruiz] in Portugal to charitably bring black and white film stock to a stranded film-crew whose finances were exhausted: their story became the background to the story for The State of Things, in which he films the crew – some of whom were borrowed from the real stranded crew – in the act of waiting.”

Opens as a sepia-toned post-apocalyptic sci-fi film starring The Territory cast, and after a few minutes turns to silvery black-and-white behind-the-scenes, with Sam Fuller playing the cinematographer, and Patrick Bauchau (Rohmer’s La Collectionneuse) as the director Fritz. After a close-up shot, Fuller tells Fritz they’re out of film. The crew gets down time, hangs around their hotel, everyone assuming the producer can send more film soon, but after a few days Fuller hears that his estranged wife has died and returns to the States, soon followed by Fritz who wants to find their producer Gordon.

Sam and Fritz:

This first half is great, from the sci-fi stuff to the beautifully shot (by Alekan again) boredom and cast/crew artistic hobbies. Then in the States, Wenders thinks we need a pulp plot. Gordon’s lawyer (Roger Corman, who supposedly helped produce The Territory) won’t say where Gordon is, but Fritz finds his mobile home and goes for a ride, finding out Gordon (Allen Garfield, a Gene Hackman type, of Hi, Mom! and Putney Swope) is broke, never paid for the movie in the first place (the screenwriter did), and owes money to gangsters, who inevitably catch up and kill both men. The very ending is a highlight, Fritz pulling out his camera, holding it like a gun while searching for the shooter.

Movie references about. Fuller himself makes a Forty Guns reference, pointed shots of a marquee with The Searchers and Fritz Lang’s star on the walk of fame. Billboards for 1980-81 movies like Caveman, The Jazz Singer and Ordinary People. Wenders was in his classic American cinema phase, having just worked with Nicholas Ray and made a couple of detective movies.

Corman:

Fuller’s driver: “I take pictures, photographs, but I never really thought in black and white before I saw our rushes. You can see the shape of things.”
Fuller: “Life is in color, but black and white is more realistic.”

Organ doom music (by Wenders regular Jürgen Knieper – not Jim Jarmusch as IMDB states) sometimes overloads the scene. Nice use of X’s Los Angeles when they arrive in Los Angeles.

Fritz complete filmography:

Artur Semedo, the other man on the dam in The Territory, plays the production manager:

I read that Joaquim Pinto’s new movie What Now? Remind Me has behind-the-scenes footage of The Territory. I would’ve made this a triple-feature, but it’s not out yet.

by ·Comments Off on Return to Salem’s Lot (1987, Larry Cohen)

As Nathan Rabin might say, this film is quite poor.

But look who co-stars:

It opens, as all respectable horror films do, with a tribal ritual sacrifice. Maverick tough guy journalist Michael Moriarty (star of Q: The Winged Serpent) is called back to the States and saddled with his neglected son Jeremy. They head to the country where Mike has inherited a family home in a town full of vampires led by Judge Andrew Duggan (Merrill’s Marauders). Jeremy falls in with the vampires, is sweet on a very young Tara Reid (Bunny Lebowski). The movie’s specific vampire mythology seems unclear, especially where it concerns Jeremy and Tara, even though the Judge tries to explain it to us. Maybe I wasn’t paying attention cuz I was wondering where the blue rubber-mask demon had gone, when Sam Fuller would appear, and what was going on with Moriarty. Mostly he and the movie seem resigned to their crappiness, the straightforward genre plot, but occasionally there’s a spark of life, some Cohen attitude in the dialogue, some fire out of Mike.

Finally, Fuller arrives as a nazi hunter turned game vampire killer. The two guys pretty quickly and easily start slaughtering the townsfolk, killing bunches as they sleep before getting cornered. Fuller fakes suicide – I wouldn’t have advised laying bloody and prone in a room full of vampires, but it seems to work out for him. The kid awakens from his pre-vamp haze and stakes the judge with an American flag.

Bunny:

Shooting the judge in the head does not work:

by ·Comments Off on White Dog (1982, Samuel Fuller)

Great movie, not badly dated except for Kristy’s 1980’s headband and boyfriend (Jameson Parker of Prince of Darkness). Written by Romain Gary, based on a true story (his wife Jean Seberg found and took home a “white dog”). After Kristy McNichol finds the “insane” dog and bonds with it, she realizes she’s got a racist killing machine on her hands and gets an obsessive Keys (Paul Winfield, couple years before The Terminator) to deprogram the dog. Things go wrong: a man is killed at church, finally the dog injures Keys’s partner Carruthers (Burl Ives) and has to be shot. Best scene is when Kristy confronts the original owner, a pleasant old man with two sweet daughters, the deceptively gentle-looking face of racism.

Cameos by Sam (though there are also Sam-surrogates, cigar-chomping old men), Christa (as a capitalist veterinary nurse) and Dick Miller (as a trainer working for Carruthers and Keys). Nice, long interview on the DVD with cowriter Curtis Hanson (L.A. Confidential), producer Jon Davison (a Joe Dante and Paul Verhoeven associate) and Christa.

J. Rosenbaum:

As in the fables of Aesop and La Fontaine, the hero of Fuller’s parable may be a dog, but the subject is the human race. .. The dog is a tragic scapegoat, neither racist nor antiracist in any human sense. .. Close-ups and subjective camera movements repeatedly place us in intimate proximity with the physical world as the dog perceives it, so that he’s not merely “a four-legged time bomb” (as Julie’s boyfriend puts it, in characteristic Fuller-ese) but also an animal whose perceptions we’re invited to share. .. Like the children in Fuller’s war films, he’s the ultimate metaphor for the world we engender and nourish and ruin and try to redeem, a cause for some hope as well as despair.

by ·Comments Off on Run of the Arrow (1957, Samuel Fuller)

One of Fuller’s final-shot ruminations – that the moment a war ends, killing turns from a heroic act into a criminal one. Feeling oppressed by the North and betrayed by his own losing side, an Irish-Confederate soldier (Rod Steiger, warmonger general of Mars Attacks!) joins a Sioux tribe against all whites. He gets guidance from doomed scout Walking Coyote (Jay Flippen, father-figure crook in The Killing), falls for a girl called Yellow Mocassin (Spanish superstar Sara Montiel, overdubbed by Angie Dickinson), and tricks suspicious Sioux warrior Crazy Wolf. A bunch of whites-vs-natives twists and betrayals later, Steiger and Moccasin leave the tribe, deciding to try their hand with the new USA instead.

Kiss Me Deadly star Ralph Meeker plays the Union officer shot twice by the same bullet (long story), and “newcomer Charles Bronson” plays a Sioux chief. There were actual Sioux players in the film, but relegated to smaller roles.

Sam:

The boys at RKO loved my yarn and gave me a green light to produce the picture the way I wanted. Indians would be depicted as a community of people with their own rules and rituals, not – as in most studio movies – like a pack of marauding killers. .. I think [Rod Steiger] earned more on that picture than I did. After all, I was only the writer, director and coproducer.

by ·Comments Off on The Crimson Kimono (1959, Samuel Fuller)

Dancer Sugar Torch is surprised in her dressing room, then chased down and shot to death in the street. Enter the cops: Glenn Corbett (star of Homicidal) and James Shigeta (of the musical Flower Drum Song). Delightfully drunk artist Mac (Anna Lee of Hangmen Also Die) points Corbett to painter Christine (Victoria Shaw of Edge of Eternity), who knew about Sugar’s new act, The Crimson Kimono, a geisha thing.

Corbett and Mac:

Lots of twisty witness-questioning ensues, and it turns out the killer is a wigmaker who thought her husband was cheating with Sugar. More interesting is the rivalry stemming from both cops falling in love with Christine the painter, which explodes when Joe beats his partner senseless during an official police kendo match. She ends up with Shigeta, the interracial thing being a pretty big deal for 1959.

Shigeta and Christine:

by ·Comments Off on Merrill’s Marauders (1962, Sam Fuller)

I always remember this wrong: in 1944, Merrill’s 3,000 U.S. troops join soldiers from other countries, launching a mission from India to reclaim Burma from the Japanese. It opens with narration aplenty, stock footage and even animation, all to set up the plight of these anonymous-looking soldier-actors led by silver-haired Jeff Chandler (in his final film, dead at age 42 from surgery complications). It’s a long slog for the soldiers, ordered to march across Burma with not enough food or rest, all sick and short-tempered, but the movie tries to keep things lively for us with its relentlessly boisterous soundtrack. Fuller says the studio convinced him to make this film as a dry run for The Big Red One. He had an actual Marauder hired as technical advisor, and was excited to have Gary Cooper play Merrill, but Cooper was too sick and would die before the film’s release.

The guys win a decisive battle near the start, think they’ll be relieved by the British, but are ordered to keep moving. Nicely shot battle at a railroad – only the aftermath is shown, a survivor standing above hundreds of casualties.

Standing on what looks like giant 3-D coffins – creepy:

The first woman in the entire movie isn’t glimpsed until an hour in, as they crash at a village to recuperate. The doctor reports: “from a medical viewpoint, they’re finished as a fighting unit.” But orders are orders, and Merrill pushes them forward, to another battle, forward again to the next one. Most of the film is the drudgery of pushing wearily forth to the next battle (Fuller: “For cryin’ out loud, the work of GI’s at war is nerve-racking and frustrating, not glorious!”), and that’s how it ends, Merrill dropping (not dead) of a heart attack while ordering them to rise from the mud and move on, and the men moving. The narrator tells us that they achieved their mission, but that only 100 of the 3,000 remained in action.

It’s not all trudging through mud and dropping dead from hunger.
There’s some good action and ‘splosions, too:

Weird for a war film to focus on the dull parts and resign the climactic battle to a mention by the voiceover. Fuller explains:

To my surprise and anger, the studio decided to cut my final scene in the editing room. Right after Merrill’s collapse, they spliced in footage of a victory parade of soldiers marching down Fifth Avenue. Jack Warner and his executives wanted an overt patriotic ending, and they decided to end the picture what that propaganda-like crap and a pompous narrator bragging about the American victory at Myitkyina. … Merrill’s Marauders got good reviews. Critics for Time and Newsweek remarked that the film had a documentary flavor, giving realistic depictions of war’s simplicity and death. The only thing they said was ‘Hollywood’ was the ending. Ironically, the opposite was true. The ending that Jack Warner’s boys tacked on was real documentary footage of a military parade. In the context, it seemed phony. My film was fiction. But it smelled of truth.

Lt. Stockton, surrogate son of Merrill: Ty Hardin of I Married a Monster from Outer Space

Doc: large-headed Andrew Duggan, a star of Larry Cohen’s Bone. Jeff Chandler was best known (and oscar-winning) for playing head Apache Cochise in three movies.

Bullseye: Peter Brown, a crimelord in Foxy Brown. At right, Chowhound: Will Hutchins, comic hero of The Shooting

Sgt. Kolowicz: round-headed Claude Akins, the jailed killer in Rio Bravo

Muley: Georgia native Charlie Briggs

Not pictured: Taggy (Pancho Magalona), a Filipino with the movie’s best comic scene, “I will wear my shirt out until all tyrants are dead!”

by ·Comments Off on Adventure in Sahara (1938, D. Ross Lederman)

Having completed my quest to watch all movies Sam Fuller directed, I took a victory lap with this action revenge flick based on a story he wrote.

Pilot Wilson (Paul Kelly of Side Street, Crossfire) hears his brother has died in Niger, immediately enlists in the French Foreign Legion, asks to serve under Captain Savatt (villain specialist C. Henry Gordon) but doesn’t tell anyone why. Among the men: Poule (Marc Lawrence, whose final film was Looney Tunes: Back in Action), a bunch of guys who want the sadistic Savatt dead, a fellow who’s always pining after his girl, and the decent second-in-command Lt. Dumond (small-mustachioed Robert Fiske, mostly from westerns). The men make a big deal over Wilson being American, but despite their French names they all sound quite American. Wilson takes the Cool Hand Luke martyr role and plots to overthrow the wicked Savatt.

Paul Kelly is quite possibly the guy on the left:

Lorna Gray (of those awful late-30’s Buster Keaton shorts) was Wilson’s girl back home, a fellow pilot, and since she hasn’t heard from him in a long while she flies to Africa, crashes her plane into the sand and wanders into the base only to find a mutiny in progress.

Most of the men successfully take over the base and send the mad captain on a death march through the desert, but incredibly he survives and returns with troops to take back his fort. The mutineers hold off the reinforcements until desert hostiles attack, forcing the two sides to work together. In the ensuing court martial, Lt. Dumond breaks his silence and tells his superiors that the men had extenuating circumstances to revolt since Savatt had been a demon – so Wilson waits a few token months in jail then gets to rejoin his hot pilot girl. I guess nobody thought to blame the mutineers for the lives they cost among men sent out with Savatt who didn’t make it out of the desert, or casualties in the fight before they opened their gates to the reinforcements. Not a very well thought-out revenge plot, overall.

Savatt is not amused:

Lederman had been a director since the 20’s, and his final film was 1951’s The Tanks Are Coming, also with story by Sam Fuller. I thought this was not bad for a standard 30’s action movie until the end, when due to crappy use of stock footage I saw the same man fall off his horse three times. I liked the music (mostly stock), some of which sounded suspiciously like that of Star Wars. Screenwriter Maxwell Shane later directed a few pictures, including Nightmare with Edward G. Robinson. Some fine work by cinematographer Franz Planer, who had worked on Murnau’s Finances of the Grand Duke and movies by Max Ophüls, before shooting King of Kings for Nick Ray.

Charles Moore played the boot polisher, would soon move on to better things, working with Capra and Hawks before becoming Preston Sturges’s favorite black actor to humiliate.

by ·1 Comment

It’s Auteur Completism Month! I try to watch all the movies by my longtime favorite filmmakers – Fuller, Lang, Jarmusch, Cocteau, Maddin and so on – but sometimes a couple titles fall through the cracks. Either I can’t find them or they’re just not a priority. Auteur Completism Month is meant to take care of that.

Sam Fuller is the one whose movies I’ve tried the hardest to see, buying a bunch from bootleg tape traders in the dark days before they all came out on DVD. This was the last lingering title on my original list, and it snuck out on disc a few months ago. IMDB has since added a bunch more titles Sam supposedly directed – six episodes of The Iron Horse and something called The Dick Powell Theatre – but I’d rather check out the movies he wrote, like The Klansman, The Deadly Trackers, The Command, The Tanks Are Coming and Confirm or Deny.

A hammy Tony Perkins introduces the series, an inadequate replacement for his onetime director Hitchcock. As far as I’m concerned Patricia Highsmith, on whose stories this series are based, is inadequate as well, but I shouldn’t judge based on a single short story. In fact, Hitch himself adapted her story for Strangers on a Train.

This story is ridiculous, but the actors are game and Fuller is freaking out in full, free Dead Pigeon on Beethoven Street mode. He must figure they wouldn’t have called him if they’d wanted a cheap but professional straightforward television production – in this post Shock Corridor (in fact, post White Dog) era, they wanted Rebel Fuller. So he threw all he had at this story of a doomed modern chicken farm, including an awesomely-edited black and white musical dream sequence, nutty angles, nuttier acting, zooms and camera shots from a chicken’s point of view – literally inside a chicken eyeball.

Gross drifter-looking John (Cris Campion of Altman’s Aria episode and Polanski’s Pirates) shows up at his aunt and uncle’s farm, discovers they’re into automated chicken farming these days. Caught him sharing inappropriately suggestive looks with aunt Helene (spanish Assumpta Serna of Wild Orchid, Piano Tuner of Earthquakes) when not being ranted at about the wonders of chicken farming by crazed, desperate, possibly loaded uncle Philippe Léotard (older brother to France’s former minister of defense, had recently been in an Agnes Varda movie, less recently in Truffaut’s Two English Girls).

Aunt Helene looks crazed:

Uncle Ernie demonstrates his enthusiasm for chicken farming:

The couple’s daughter Samantha Fuller’s little cat dies as soon as John arrives – a bad sign. There’s some time-killing business. Neighbors Manuel Pereiro (Pod People) and Christa Lang come to visit. Then Samantha herself dies by suffocating in the grain (possible references: A Corner in Wheat, Vampyr) and her parents lose it. Helene frees the chickens who kill uncle Ernie then gather outside under the watchful eye of the single rooster. And Helene starts making out with her nephew (who often looks like a scarecrow). Shot by Alain Levent (Cleo from 5 to 7, The Nun). Some corny dialogue and ominous keyboard music and abuse of the song “Old Macdonald,” but a cute movie. Anyway, a good November 1 transition movie from SHOCKtober to Auteur month.

Christa Lang:

Some chickens were almost definitely harmed in the making of this picture.

by ·Comments Off on The Virginian: It Tolls For Thee (1962, Samuel Fuller)

A silly TV western series in which the good guys smile all the time, with an episode written/directed by the great Sam Fuller in his prime (between Underworld USA and Shock Corridor) and guest starring Lee Marvin. In 1884, Marvin shoots gang leader Sharkey (Warren Kemmerling of Close Encounters) and takes over the gang (were they called gangs back then?), plotting revenge on Judge Garth (Lee J. Cobb of Party Girl, Call Northside 777, Our Man Flint) for sending him away years earlier (of course, that’s always why dudes in westerns want revenge on judges). It’s up to our gang of interchangeable white-hats to stop him – and stop him they will, but not before Lee Marvin gets in a good bit of badassery (oh, spell-check doesn’t like that word).

I assume Fuller was working with a rush schedule and stock crew, but he was always a guy who worked fast, so he gets in plenty of striking shots. He also crams the script with literary quotes and references to newspapermen (Joseph Pulitzer is a major presence in the episode). Glad I tracked this one down.