Sam Fuller and the Creation of Neo-Noir

When did classic noir give way to neo-noir? There's no definite answer to that question, of course, but the best candidate is probably the one-two punch of Sam Fuller's 1963 SHOCK CORRIDOR and his 1964 THE NAKED KISS. After these two landmarks, nothing would ever be the same. Check out my new essay over at Los Angeles Review of Books Neo-Noir And Anti-Realism in Sam Fuller. 

Killing Jesse

I'm a big fan of Andrew Dominik's 2007 THE ASSASSINATION OF JESSE JAMES BY THE COWARD ROBERT FORD. Though it bombed at the box office and made a quiet transition to DVD, it remains one of the most original westerns I've ever seen. It's long, meditative and haunting, with undertones of sexual repression and violent jealousy embodied in the mesmerizing performances by Casey Affleck as Bob Ford and Brad Pitt as Jesse. I think it's pretty damn great.

Having said that, I will admit that it's not for every taste. It's less of a western, really, and more of an epic character study. When I saw it in the theater in 2007, most of the audience walked out. By the end it was just me and one other dude. (You and me, buddy--wherever you are.)

I say all this to say that recently I saw Sam Fuller's 1949 I SHOT JESSE JAMES for the first time. Though it is far more of a conventional western (at least by our standards today), I was surprised by how closely it mirrors the story of the Dominik film. Fuller's directorial debut, it doesn't have quite the snap and fire of his later work, but it does have a distinct point of view, a sympathy for the devil that we'd see throughout his career. One reason that the film isn't better is that it stars John Ireland as Bob Ford and Reed Hadley as Jesse. Ireland could be effective in supporting roles (think RED RIVER) but he was pretty bland as a leading man. (This lack of charisma is ironic given Ireland's offscreen reputation as one of Hollywood's most nortious skirtchasers.) As for Hadley, he was better known as a voiceover man. He did a lot of the booming Voice Of Authority reads that you hear at the beginning of docu-noirs. Seeing him here, it's no surprise that he wasn't more often employed onscreen.

Still, I SHOT JESSE JAMES makes for interesting lesson in how a story is shaped and molded by style and performance. It's like listening to an earlier version of a favorite tune.

The Naked Kiss (1964)

Among the great directors of film noir, Sam Fuller might be the one who most resembles a pulp novelist. His characters are stereotypes raised to flash point and his images pop off the screen like crisp, lurid prose. That’s nowhere more true than in his The Naked Kiss, a film with one of the all-time great movie openings. Without warning the movie starts: a woman is striking the camera as violent, jazz music boils away underneath. We realize she’s slapping a man around. He begs her to stop. They wrestle, and he grabs at her hair and a wig slips off her bald head. Now she’s really pissed off. After she’s beaten him senseless, she rolls him for seventy-five bucks. Then she picks up her wig, goes to a mirror and puts herself together. Then we get the credits.

It’s a hell of a beginning. The woman is a prostitute named Kelly. After she rolls the guy—who we later learn is her pimp—she skips town and winds up in a quiet little place called Grantville. It apparently has one cop, a plainclothes Captain named Griff. By all appearances, he hangs out at the bus station waiting for hookers to pull into town. He and Kelly have a twenty dollar fling (she talks him up from ten dollars), and then he tells her to get out of town. Nice guy.

Kelly doesn’t leave, though. Deciding to stick around and make a new life for herself, she takes a job at the hospital where she works in the sick ward for kids. She also meets the richest guy in town, JL Grant, a scion of old money who’s lucky enough to live in town that bears his family name. They fall in love—much to the resentment of Grant’s best friend, Griff the cop.

The film packs some big surprises in its last thirty minutes or so, and you are strongly urged not to find out anymore about the plot if you can avoid it. Fuller—who wrote, directed and produced the low budget film—takes his film into areas that are still shocking to viewers today. The last time I watched this film, I saw it with three friends who had never seen it before and during the scenes of revelation at the end, people actually gasped.

Fuller is film geek’s director—a man of uncontrollable passions and bedrock integrity. He made some fine films inside the studio system (Pickup on South Street, House of Bamboo), but he was simply too much of a loose canon and he spent much of his career trying to scrape up money for his low budget productions (like the amazing Shock Corridor).

The Naked Kiss was shot for about ten cents and looks like it, but Fuller works within these limitations like the pulp novelists he so closely resembled. Fast and efficient, he also had the good fortune not to be a perfectionist. His independent films are messy, but they’re not sloppy. He loved jarring visuals, and The Naked Kiss, with its ubiquitous shadows and slanted cameras, is noir down to its bones. Working without money or sets or stars, he nevertheless created a film that is, in its wild ass way, the visual superior of bigger budgeted and more politely directed movies.

He didn’t have stars, but he did have actors. The film is grounded by the fierce performance of Constance Towers as Kelly. This maybe the toughest broad who ever stalked through a film noir. With a soft spot for kids and old people, she is otherwise a block steel—with nice curves, of course. She kicks a lot of ass in this film—more perhaps than any female heroine who preceded her in American movies. Check out the scene where she goes to a brothel to slap around a madam who has been trying to recruit one of her friends. Kelly pounces on her and makes her eat twenty-five bucks in wadded up bribe money.

Fuller was after more than just cheap thrills, though. An iconoclast with a revulsion for hypocrisy, he casts his pitiless eye on small town America and consciously exposes the disconnect between reality and polite society’s view of itself.

Which is not to suggest that Fuller was a realist. Far from it. He liked grittiness for its own sake, and loved art’s ability to translate emotion and struggle from the shifting currents of life to a more manageable form. “Reality,” he liked to say “is a bunch of damn bullshit.” His theory, as least as I interpret it, was that since reality could never be less than everything and everyone all at once, the representation of reality in art was impossible. Thus an artist was not in business to put real life on screen; he was in business to recreate it in a way that made it interesting or insightful for the viewer.

This led to a style that is not for everyone. Fuller’s emotions are huge. Subtly is not a concept he understands or finds the least bit interesting. It’s not surprising to learn that The Naked Kiss—a film I admire and enjoy and which is highly thought of by many critics and directors—is in the book The 100 Most Amusingly Bad Movies Ever Made. Fuller doesn’t go over the top from time to time in this film. He blasts over the top in a rocket in the first scene and never looks back. The Naked Kiss is a thoroughly bizarre movie. Whether or not the viewer finds it great or terrible depends on the viewer, I suppose. But you should see it, either way. Fuller, love him or hate him, deserves to be confronted.

Street Of No Return (made 1987, released 1989)

The idea of a David Goodis adaptation directed by Sam Fuller is enough to make a hardcore noir geek foam at the mouth. It’s a meeting of two giants of the genre: the tragic Goodis, author of booze-drenched nightmares like The Moon In The Gutter and Of Tender Sin; and the irascible Fuller, director of subversive masterworks like Pickup On South Street and The Naked Kiss. The only problem with this marriage of giants is that the resulting movie stinks.

Maybe the root of the problem is that it all happened too late. The film—which stars Keith Carradine as a washed-up rock star drawn into a scheme to instigate a race riot, a scheme that also ties back to a violent event in his own past—was filmed by Fuller in 1987 and, sadly, it looks every bit as dated as an Air Supply video. It doesn’t help that Fuller took the opportunity to actually film a soft rock video starring Carradine and a naked girl on a horse. But more on that later.

The script, by Jacques Bral and Fuller, hews rather closely to Goodis’ original novel. A bum is looking for a drink one night when he stumbles into a race riot under way. In the midst of the confusion, he sees a woman from his past. He follows her to a house where he finds other people from his past, including a beautiful woman he used to be in love with. He discovers that she’s still with a group of thugs, the same group of thugs who, years before, had given him a savage beating for trying to steal her away from them. The beating ended his singing career and sent him into a life of boozing. When he discovers that this crew is in cahoots with a local gang leader to start a race war in the city to drive down property rates, the bum rallies his wits and fortitude and brings their criminal enterprise crashing down. At the end of the book, however, his triumph is short-lived and he ends up back on the bottle. In a Goodis novel, triumph is something you pass on your way back to the gutter.

In some ways, Sam Fuller is the exact wrong director for this kind of material. He was a great director, of course, but his style was all about impact. His images leap off the screen, and in his best work (Pickup On South Street, The Naked Kiss, Shock Corridor) they’re ferocious. Subtly wasn’t Fuller’s thing. Neither was reality. “Reality,” he liked to say, “is a bunch of damn bullshit. There’s no such thing as reality.” Since reality could never be less than everything and everyone all at once, the representation of reality in art was impossible. Thus, the artist was better off embracing a heightened sense of things. That theory of art, and Fuller’s wild-ass practice of it, is out of synch with the quiet desperation at the heart of Goodis’ work.

Goodis liked to say that he didn’t write thrillers, he wrote melodramas with action. The funny thing is, the best part of his work was not the action, it was the melodrama. His plots never made a lot of sense, and that’s especially true of Street Of No Return. You don’t read the book for the outlandish race riot plot; you read it for the quality of the prose, for the overpowering sense of real disappointment at its core. Fuller seems to have missed this quality, and, indeed, he even rethinks Goodis' beautiful heartbreaker of an ending. That's his prerogative as a filmmaker, of course, but his new ending makes no sense on any level. He hustles past the brutal irony of the main character's doom in favor of a tacked-on bit of uplift.

Tellingly, the director said that what drew him to the script (he claimed not to have read the book, though he was friendly with Goodis) was, of all things, the chance to film a race riot.
While the riot scenes have a fierce energy, however, Fuller doesn’t see any further into the problems of race than Goodis did in his novel. The people of color here are all pawns of an unconvincing plot to make money by a few white crooks. There’s no sense of what actual racial problems might be at the root of the violence on the street.

The entire movie has a fierce energy, but much of that energy is expressed through overacting. Carradine avoids overacting by going the other way and giving a boring performance (even in his big concert scene, he seems slightly lethargic), but everyone else chews the scenery like ravenous dogs. Bill Duke has a good introductory scene as the embattled police chief, but Fuller has him spend the rest of the movie screaming curses and delivering preposterous speeches. It's sad to see an actor of Duke's quality wasted so thoroughly in a role he might have turned into something interesting.

The over-the-top quality of the film isn’t just expressed though the acting though. Fuller overdoes just about everything. The scene where Carradine turns a fire hose on a room full of cops and rioters isn’t just absurd and sloppily choreographed, it’s embarrassing. Likewise, Fuller’s rock video, with Carradine made up like some low rent Bowie while poor Valentia Vargas rides naked on a horse, is possibly the worst thing the director ever committed to celluloid. It pains me to say it, but the sequence has the mark of an old man trying to be hip. Not just hip, but1987 hip.

Here’s great idea: read the novel Street Of No Return, and watch The Naked Kiss. Let this little seen movie rest in relative obscurity.

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I've written before on the difficulty Goodis poses for adaptation.

And here's a link to an interesting interview with Steve Seid, curator of the Pacific Film Archives, about a Goodis film retrospective.

Finally, the cult of Goodis maybe small but is serious and continues to grow. 2007 saw the first GoodisCon, a gathering of fans and scholars of the author's work. The conference--which I sadly could not attend--was a big success and has turned into NoirCon.