From the Front Page to the Front Lines: The Essential Sam Fuller

July 29–August 31, 2022

Ten essential films from Samuel Fuller’s influential oeuvre confront prejudice and inequity head-on, chronicling the grit, resilience, and soulful struggle of misfits, foot soldiers, petty criminals, detectives, and reporters surviving in the face of moral misgivings or psychological trauma.

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Pickup on South Street
House of Bamboo
Shock Corridor
The Steel Helmet
The Crimson Kimono

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Past Films

The Big Red One: The Reconstruction
- Wednesday, August 31 7 PM
Samuel Fuller
United States, 1980/2004
35mm Print

Fuller’s dream project was based on a nightmare: his own experience of combat in World War II. Richard Schickel’s 2004 reconstruction used Fuller’s script and notes to repair and reinstate scenes missing from the truncated version released in 1980.
Shock Corridor
- Saturday, August 27 7 PM
Samuel Fuller
United States, 1963
Archival 35mm Print

A Pulitzer Prize–seeking journalist has himself committed to a mental institution to investigate the unsolved murder of one of the patients, witnessed by three inmates: a brainwashed GI, a broken-spirited Black activist, and a former nuclear physicist.
The Naked Kiss
- Wednesday, August 24 7 PM
Samuel Fuller
United States, 1964
Archival 35mm Print

Fuller’s tabloid sensibilities propelled his most florid tale, starring Constance Towers as a prostitute who descends on Anytown, USA, in an effort to go straight and winds up caught in a web of scandal.
Underworld U.S.A.
- Saturday, August 20 7 PM
Samuel Fuller
United States, 1961
Archival 35mm Print

In Fuller’s purest film noir, starkly photographed by Hal Mohr in deep shadows, Cliff Robertson’s Tolly Devlin is a brutishly single-minded protagonist doomed by his desire for revenge. In Fuller’s noir universe, there’s no redemption for the pathologically obsessed.
The Crimson Kimono
- Wednesday, August 17 7 PM
Samuel Fuller
United States, 1959
Archival 35mm Print

Celebrating both diversity and racial unity in a rare moment of optimism, Fuller uses Los Angeles’s Little Tokyo as the backdrop for a sympathetic portrayal of interracial romance embedded in a police melodrama about the murder of a nightclub stripper.
Forty Guns
- Friday, August 12 7 PM
Samuel Fuller
United States, 1957
Fuller’s wildly Freudian Western—brilliantly blatant in its conflation of sex, violence, and power, and its “perversion” of the Western’s usual treatment of all three—stars Barbara Stanwyck as a “high-ridin’ woman with a whip.”
House of Bamboo
- Wednesday, August 10 7 PM
Samuel Fuller
United States, 1955
Archival 35mm Print

Fuller combines two favorite topics, crime and GIs, in the first postwar Hollywood film shot in Japan. Astonishing CinemaScope images of Tokyo street life illuminate the backdrop of this gangster film involving crooked ex-soldiers organizing a syndicate in occupied Japan.
Park Row
- Friday, August 5 7 PM
Samuel Fuller
United States, 1952
A history in miniature of the emergence of modern journalism and a combined portrait of Joseph Pulitzer and other great newspaper editors of the period, Park Row was, for Fuller, “the story of my heart,” a love letter to the popular press.
The Steel Helmet
- Wednesday, August 3 7 PM
Samuel Fuller
United States, 1951
Archival 35mm Print

Disdain for war creeps into every characterization of Fuller’s grim film about an American patrol lost in the woods of North Korea, which the Pentagon called “vicious [and] full of perversions.”
Pickup on South Street
- Friday, July 29 7 PM
Samuel Fuller
United States, 1953
Archival 35mm Print

Fuller managed to irk Herbert Hoover and leftist critics by depicting honest crooks caught between the cops and a Communist plot.

From the Front Page to the Front Lines: The Essential Sam Fuller

July 29–August 31, 2022

“To watch a Fuller film is to be immediately pushed, face first into the hypocrisies and criminal fictions that make up the American Myth.” —Ginger Varney, LA Weekly

In his astonishing autobiography, Samuel Fuller (1911–1977) recounted his early career trajectory from New York City paperboy to Hollywood screenwriter. Along the way, he learned effective, concise storytelling by reporting on crime stories, riots, and executions. In the midst of the Great Depression, he headed west, filing stories about the hardscrabble existence of the people he met along the way and arriving in San Francisco in time to cover the 1934 general strike. Eventually, Fuller made his way to Hollywood, where he worked as a scriptwriter until 1941, when, at the age of twenty-nine, he enlisted in the infantry, keen to cover what he called “the biggest crime story of the century” from the front lines.

After the war, Fuller...

“To watch a Fuller film is to be immediately pushed, face first into the hypocrisies and criminal fictions that make up the American Myth.” —Ginger Varney, LA Weekly

After the war, Fuller distilled his experiences and applied his storytelling skills to directing war movies, Westerns, and crime dramas. His stripped-down B movie style—Fuller preferred a curtailed budget to limited creative control—is evocative of compelling reportage, every shot and every cut deployed for maximum impact. Always on the side of the underdog, his films seek to confront prejudice and inequity head-on, chronicling the grit, resilience, and soulful struggle of misfits, foot soldiers, petty criminals, detectives, and reporters to survive tough breaks, moral misgivings, or psychological trauma. The Essential Sam Fuller consists of ten of the finest films in Fuller’s influential oeuvre, including Pickup on South Street, film noir perfection; The Crimson Kimono, a gripping policier and interracial love story; and The Big Red One, Fuller’s semi-autobiographical World War II epic.

—Kate MacKay, Associate Film Curator

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Thanks to Katie Dintelman, 20th Century Studios/Criterion Pictures; Alyssa Peeples, Swank Motion Pictures; Kristie Nakamura, Warner Bros. Classics; Brian Belovarac, Ben Crossley-Marra, Janus Films; Edda Manriquez, Taylor Morales, Academy Film Archive; Steven K. Hill, Todd Weiner, UCLA Film & Television Archive; Chris Chouinard, Park Circus; Sophia Lorent, George Eastman Museum; and Mark Johnson, Harvard Film Archive.