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AMERICAN CINEMA PAPERS
2004
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THE
BIG RED ONE MOVIE LEGEND SAM FULLER SHOWS AND TELLS – IN CANNES AND PARIS by Harlan Kennedy He fought in wars. He stormed beaches. He
battled Hollywood moguls. He was an old dogface and proud of it. Sam Fuller
looked as if he’d lived through a thousand explosions – some of them coming
from inside him – and his smoke-white hair, blazing eyes and fissured face,
tough as a walnut, were the testimony. The Cannes Film Festival, the ‘Big Azure
One’, is the battle front of world cinema and Sam was always proud to be
there. He loved to pitch in among peers, to talk pictures; to paint pictures for you with his
stories and memories. “Oh y-e-a-h!”,
he’d say, grabbing your sleeve and burning a hole in your eyes with his own.
And he’d be off into tales of love, death, war, moviemaking. There were friends by the hundreds for him at
Cannes. Film lovers, comrades in arms, the French in general. He lived in Paris
in his last years, maybe for gratitude. The French knew him for a genius
before anyone else. They gave his films the run of the Cinematheque. They
wrote essays on him. No sapient person in the country that invented
cinemagoing would give you a blank look
if you spat out
Sam’s titles like a repeating gun. STEEL
HELMET, MERRILL’S MARAUDERS,
UNDERWORLD USA, HELL AND HIGH WATER, PICKUP ON SOUTH STREET. Jean-Luc Godard
even cast him in a film. Sam played himself in PIERROT LE FOU. Featured in a
party scene, he rasps out the most famous line in all Godard’s cinema. What
is film?, someone asks. “The film is like a battleground. Love, hate, action,
violence, death. In one word, emotion.” He said “emotion” like he meant it. “E-moh-shun!” (Like “Ex-ploh-shun”). Today in ways Fuller couldn’t have predicted, as the
entire planet gets digital, emotion seems more than ever the perfect word for
the art of the moving image. After e-mail and e-ticketing – ‘e-motion’.
Motion electronically charged and conjured, on a zillion TVs by a zillion
computers and DVD players. The French gave their favourite adopted
filmmaker one last glorious send-off at Cannes this year. Fuller would have
loved to have been there himself, but couldn’t be. He had fallen finally in
1997 – that last fall, death – aged
86. But his battle epic THE BIG RED ONE, a World War 2 movie that begins in
World War 1, was there to represent him. The film had been royally
reconstituted, in what you’d call a director’s cut if the director had been
around to cut it. Instead US critic Richard Shickel
had done the snip-and-add stuff, and the Salle Bunuel in the Cannes
Festival Palace was where several hundred gathered to cheer the great
dogface’s last bigtime film testament. Sergeant Lee Marvin and his four grunts,
hauling themselves from North Africa to Sicily to Normandy to Berlin, now
have a little more screen time to live it like it was. The journey of combat,
murder and death, those stations of the Cross that human beings live out
every time the world goes to war. (Is it coincidence – surely not – that the
movie begins and climaxes with that mysterious Cross in the wasteland?) In a preface to his novel of THE BIG RED ONE
Fuller, who served in the eponymous infantry division in World War 2, told us
what he intended with book and film. “This is fictional life based on factual
death. Any similarity the names have to any person living, wounded, missing,
hospitalized, insane or dead is coincidental.” That’s telling ‘em. And Fuller told us something else, something
mischievously seditious, in the very way he made the picture and the location
he chose. The Sahara, Sicily and
Northern Europe were all played by – Israel! Jews took the roles of Nazi
soldiers, wearing German helmets over yarmulkas.
The concentration camp at Falkenau, Czechoslovakia,
was filmed in the heart of Jerusalem. Jewish death camp survivors played the
People’s Army fighting for Hitler. Is that why THE BIG RED ONE seems more like
some surrealist pageant, some vast and antic comic-book apocalypse, than a
regular war flick? Or like some momentous mystery play drawing its audience
after it as it travels from despair to hope, cynicism to salvation, horror to
faith – not in God but in a brave, defiant survival instinct that will see
humanity through, to the next trial of fire, then the next, then the
next. In its new version the film is almost
everything Fuller fans wanted, though maybe we still hanker for the ideal war
movie proposed by Sam himself in the afterword to
that novel version of THE BIG RED ONE. “To make a real war movie would be to
occasionally fire at the audience from behind the screen during a battle
scene. But word-of-mouth from casualties wouldn’t help the film to sell
tickets. And again, such reaching for reality is against the law. Anyone
seeing the movie or reading the book will survive.” I met
Sam Fuller once at the Cannes Film Festival and later again in Paris – long
years ago, when THE BIG RED ONE was a gleam in his eye, or maybe a gleam at
the end of one of his torpedo-like cigars. (He was like Conrad’s narrator
Marlowe, conjuring tales of death and horror from the genie glow of his
cheroot). In Fuller’s small walk-up apartment in a seen-better-decades
building in the Rue de Reuilly in south-eastern
Paris – an artist’s garret in all but name, where Sam barely had room to
swing a Havana but could always light out to his favourite Chinese restaurant
nearby – we talked for two hours about everything and anything. I can’t pretend to duplicate on paper his
sound and manner in full flow. You half-know it already – from his cameo
roles for Wim Wenders in
THE STATE OF THINGS and THE AMERICAN FRIEND – but the reality outstrips the
screen replica. Fuller rasps, barks, singsongs, whispers, hisses, confides.
He’ll deepen his voice for a gravel-growled basso profundo
to speak of some unforgotten betrayal or act of bad faith. Then he’ll go
near-falsetto with excitement – “Yi-yi-yi-yi!” –
when speaking of an actor, director or movie he loves. The ultimate Fuller signature sound, though,
is the hiss of passion to climax a speech, a cresting wave of exclamatory
ratification, breaking on the beach of an anecdote, memory or statement of
faith. “Oh y-e-a-h!” Or “Ahhhhhhh!!” or “Whaaaahhhhh!!!” It is often accompanied by a frenzied
grasp of the listener’s sleeve and the transfixing of him with a glittering
eye like that of the Ancient Mariner reaching his story apogee. Playing my tape-recorded memories over, I
note that Fuller’s mind kept driving back to those five verities he had
summed up for Godard. Had summed up, in PIERROT LE
FOU, as quintessentialising cinema. Love. Hate. Action. Violence. Death. FULLER ON LOVE. (One day in the early
1950s Fuller had a meeting with 20th Century Fox studio boss
Darryl F Zanuck and FBI chief J.Edgar
Hoover, to discuss the “unpatriotic” elements in Fuller’s script for his new
movie PICKUP ON SOUTH STREET). “The
Richard Widmark character goes out and gets that
stolen microfilm from the Commies, that’s good,” Sam expounds, looking me in
the eye with an eye as bright as the cigar tip he is dangerously waving. “But
he did it for a girl ‘and that’s no
good!’ said Hoover. And Zanuck said, ‘But
that’s what we want! That’s a story! That’s true! That man I
believe in!’ This girl – it’s the first time anyone took an interest in Widmark’s character in the story. She even takes a
beating for him. There’s no love scene in my picture, Widmark
doesn’t ever say ‘I love you.’ He just says” – Fuller draws out each syllable
– “‘W-h-a-t’s the n-a-m-e of the m-a-n who beat u-p
on you?’ That’s all he wanted to know. ‘Who beat up on you?’ And Hoover hated that! ‘Cos
now it could have been any war, any flavour of victory or defeat. Politics,
who’s on whose side politically, doesn’t mean a thing when you’re a bum like Widmark and make a couple of bucks trying to steal a
watch and someone’s nice to you and you come to the hospital to see her all
beat up and you say, ‘Why did they beat up on you?’ ‘I didn’t tell them who you were’ – that’s all she says!” Pause
for wonderment. “Whaaahhhhh!!!
No music! I just had that camera move in. And she lies there. And he
looks at her. And that’s his love
scene!” FULLER ON HATE. “I got into trouble when I
made a film that brought out the racism in war. STEEL HELMET.” Fuller
takes a chomping puff on a new stogie. “Korean
war, independent 10-day picture, 104,000 bucks. I hadda
go to the Pentagon. All I wanted was some stock shots. I needed a shot of a
240-mm gun firing and hitting the side of a mountain. And they said” – slow,
deliberate, teeth-baring growl – “ ‘We
wouldn’t give you the sweat off our balls…Your picture is anti-American.
It’s unAmerican. It’s pro-commie. It’s everything
we loathe and that we’re fighting.’ Well, I did the picture, I went ahead and
did the picture – ‘cos this was a colonial
invasion! It was against the Constitution of the United States! One hunnerd percent! All these men in the Pentagon could’ve
gone to jail! Oh y-e-a-h!” – staring
Fuller eyes. “But we had a scene in the picture, very powerful, where the
Manchurian-Chinese prisoner of war, very intelligent, smart, who knew all
about the internment of Japanese nationals in America after Pearl Harbor, and that Chinese were interned too ‘cos nobody could tell the difference, turns to a Japanese-American
GI and says, ‘You have the same damn slant eyes as I. Then how come you fight
for these white sons of bitches
when you know they HATE OUR GUTS?” Fuller’s face blazes 12 inches from mine.
It’s as if I am the GI and the question is for me. After a minute’s
eye-locking he takes another cigar and moves on to another motherlode of memory, this time about the harum-scarum
logistics of location filming – or location filming Fuller-style. FULLER ON ACTION. “Robert Stack had his life
in jeopardy (making Fuller’s HOUSE OF
BAMBOO on location in Japan in 1955). I had three or four CinemaScope
cameras looking down into this shopping street where he’s supposed to run
after our only other actor – the rest of the crowd was real, they didn’t know
we were filming – says out loud ‘This white son of a bitch stole my watch!’
Well, Stack runs towards the camera and on the first take the crowd literally
ripped him naked!” Pause for effect. “I wasn’t allowed to use the
shot: Zanuck, when he saw it in Hollywood, was horrified.
Stack was very upset ‘cos that was a dangerous run.
They could have killed him, there were still high feelings in Japan ten years
after the war.” Later in the same movie an unrepentant Fuller
subjected Stack to real bomb explosions in an action sequence. “In America you can’t use nitroglycerine, TNT or dynamite. When I was told I could
use real explosives in Japan – oooohhhhhhhhhHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!.”
Look of deranged relish on Fuller’s face. “So we did use explosives. No
one was hurt – but I hadn’t told them I was using real dynamite, so when the
actors felt the ground shake and quake when they were filming you could see
the fear in their faces. You can still see it. That shot we used!!” All’s fair in love and film. When Fuller
breaks to fetch me some coffee, I feel that to keep the mood I should drink
it from a tin cup while shells burst around me. Death, the last adventure, is
always close in Fuller’s cinema. FULLER ON DEATH. “There is no law in war. But
we ‘make’ one,” he says with a derisive snap. “The Geneva Convention is
bullshit. Completely. A piece of
paper is nothing. What’s in your hand is a gun, and what’s in there is a
5-cent bullet. That’s your treaty, or no treaty. And when you see a man and
he gives up, you either shoot him or you don’t. You do it, you’re God!
There’s no president, no general, it’s the GI, it’s the Tommy Atkins, it’s how he
feels, right there. And if you’re on the wrong end of the gun and he
looks you in the eye, you know you’re gonna get it,
and you get it. One thing is” – sarcastic look – “you’re not supposed to
shoot a prisoner-of-war. I don’t believe in that! When a man came to us as a
prisoner-of-war, and he throws down his gun, his Mauser,
and puts his hands in the air, my sergeant would pick that Mauser up and he’d rack it back and if there’s a round in
there, just one bullet, that guy lives. But if he ran out of bullets, ohhhh” – look of caustic and cosmic
judgment – “we blow his head off. ‘Cos, isn’t that cute?? He shoots your friend here. He
wounds this guy. He wounds you. Kills that guy. And then he says to another
guy, ‘Don’t shoot!’ Why? Because he ran
out of amm-un-ition….!” He draws the phrase out like a
death-rattle, at once summation and damnation. There are many forms of violence and Fuller
has depicted most of them on screen.
But he pays homage too to the other artists who have excelled at portraying
other cruelties and emotional violations.
FULLER ON VIOLENCE. “Noel Coward. Phenomenal!
Man of the theatre. Great!! Not just good but great. He made people laugh.
But he loved movies too. He acted in them, wrote them, directed them. BRIEF
ENCOUNTER! Yi-yi-yiy!” The voice does a jig of admiration.
“For me the greatest story of violence in the world is not physical, not
Wayne walking into a bar and shooting guys or slugging them. But a married
man and married woman, not married to each other, are about to do something naugh-tee, and they’re embarrassed…!” He teases out the scene-painting with mock archness. “And the terrible emotional flavour of guilt –
each one afraid of even touching the other’s hand! – in that room. Trevor
Howard, Celia Johnson. And the fellow who’s lending the room comes in and
says, ‘Sorry, I forgot my key….’ And the moment breaks, and the horror of
that, and the fear, and the welling up of guilt, and the murder of their
passion – that’s true violence!” And for Fuller only movies can truly capture
it, as they capture truthfully so many things. We come to the conversation’s
last cigar and last hurrah. Fuller pays tribute to a ‘seventh art’ that is for so many the first
and foremost. In a late-afternoon
Paris apartment, the three most
brightly glowing lights are Fuller’s Havana and his two raptly envisioning
eyes. FULLER ON CINEMA. “In the arts cinema is
number one. Thousands of years from now,
they’ll be making movies. They’ll be showing them to more people on
more planets. It’ll be a universal language, in a way we have no conception
of today. “It’s the only art. If I want to show Lister in action, I’ll show closeups
of what he meant by that word ‘antiseptic’. If I want to show Goya in action, or Liszt
arguing about a certain musical note, I will see it, hear it, dramatise it. “It’s the only artform
in the world where all arts are on the screen. And it’s a weapon for peace. It’s the
greatest education for kids – the greatest – not to shoot or kill or hurt or
go to war.” COURTESY T.P.
MOVIE NEWS. WITH THANKS TO THE AMERICAN FILM INSTITUTE FOR THEIR CONTINUING
INTEREST IN WORLD FILM. ©HARLAN KENNEDY. All rights reserved. |
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