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

Pickup on South Street
Samuel Fuller
United States, 1953
Archival 35mm Print
Friday, July 29 7 PM
Fuller managed to irk Herbert Hoover and leftist critics by depicting honest crooks caught between the cops and a Communist plot.
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The Steel Helmet
Samuel Fuller
United States, 1951
Archival 35mm Print
Wednesday, August 3 7 PM
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.”
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Park Row
Samuel Fuller
United States, 1952
Friday, August 5 7 PM
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.
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House of Bamboo
Samuel Fuller
United States, 1955
Archival 35mm Print
Wednesday, August 10 7 PM
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.
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Forty Guns
Samuel Fuller
United States, 1957
Friday, August 12 7 PM
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.”
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The Crimson Kimono
Samuel Fuller
United States, 1959
Archival 35mm Print
Wednesday, August 17 7 PM
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.
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Underworld U.S.A.
Samuel Fuller
United States, 1961
Archival 35mm Print
Saturday, August 20 7 PM
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.
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The Naked Kiss
Samuel Fuller
United States, 1964
Archival 35mm Print
Wednesday, August 24 7 PM
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.
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Shock Corridor
Samuel Fuller
United States, 1963
Archival 35mm Print
Saturday, August 27 7 PM
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.
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The Big Red One: The Reconstruction
Samuel Fuller
United States, 1980/2004
35mm Print
Wednesday, August 31 7 PM
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.
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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.