Photo: Lee Marvin as The Sergeant in Samuel Fuller's The Big Red One
Samuel Fuller's rough and uncompromising genre films (Underworld U.S.A., Pickup on South Street, Shock Corridor) were always brimming with blunt poetry, typical of an "authentic American primitive" (as the director was famously dubbed by critic Andrew Sarris). Though never one to drape his rugged films in traditional cinematographic beauty, Fuller's fast-and-furious direction had a hard-wired velocity and stringent ferocity that—when coupled with his disdain for melodramatic mawkishness—made him a hero of the independent film community (the French New Wave, as well as Americans such as Jim Jarmusch, revered him like a deity) and a paragon of extreme, from-the-gut filmmaking. They may not have been the prettiest or nicest pictures ever created, but you could feel the grit and grandeur of a Samuel Fuller film deep in the pit of your stomach. Nick Schager
Samuel Fuller's rough and uncompromising genre films (Underworld U.S.A., Pickup on South Street, Shock Corridor) were always brimming with blunt poetry, typical of an "authentic American primitive" (as the director was famously dubbed by critic Andrew Sarris). Though never one to drape his rugged films in traditional cinematographic beauty, Fuller's fast-and-furious direction had a hard-wired velocity and stringent ferocity that—when coupled with his disdain for melodramatic mawkishness—made him a hero of the independent film community (the French New Wave, as well as Americans such as Jim Jarmusch, revered him like a deity) and a paragon of extreme, from-the-gut filmmaking. They may not have been the prettiest or nicest pictures ever created, but you could feel the grit and grandeur of a Samuel Fuller film deep in the pit of your stomach. Nick Schager
