By Raymond Benson
By Raymond Benson
Director Samuel Fuller is a controversial figure in American cinema history. Audiences either love him or hate him, and there is usually no in-between. Incorporating a style that is often over-the-top, no matter what the genre or story might be, Fuller’s films are very much in your face. Outspoken, opinionated, and an auteur who wasn’t afraid to stand on a soapbox and shout to the masses what he felt was injustice, bigotry, or hypocrisy, Fuller belongs in the camp of directors who attempted social change but never achieved popular success doing it. Today he is revered as a cult figure by such filmmakers as Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino, Jim Jarmusch, and Tim Robbins (all who appear in the documentary, The Typewriter, the Rifle and the Movie Camera, a bonus feature on the Shock Corridor DVD). One can certainly see Fuller’s influences on the films of Scorsese and Tarantino. Scorsese admits “stealing†a sequence from an early Fuller war film, The Steel Helmet, and using it in Raging Bull.
The Criterion Collection has remastered and restored in high definition two of Fuller’s gems from the sixties—Shock Corridor (1963) and The Naked Kiss (1964) for DVD and Blu Ray. Anyone unfamiliar with the director’s work will do no better than to dive in to these powerful, dynamic dramas—or shall I say… melodramas. And that they are. In both pictures, the acting is heightened, the dialogue borders on the corny (some sequences are unintentionally funny today), and the subject matter is lurid. How these films were released in a time when the Production Code was still in effect is a mystery (they were issued “for mature audiences only,†several years before the ratings in America came about).