Sam's the man

Remembering Worcester's Mr. Fuller

If the world were a fair joint, flags would have been at half-mast in Worcester after the October 30 death, at age 86, of native son Sam Fuller, "B" filmmaker supreme.

I'm sure most of Worcester hasn't heard of Sam, who left his hometown for New York City at age 14 to become a copy boy, then advanced to crime reporting for yellow-journalism dailies on both coasts. When he directed pictures, starting with the headline confessional I Shot Jesse James in 1949, he forged them like tabloids: cheap, on deadline, bursting with sordid, colorful characters, and screaming with vivid, in-your-face, Weegee-style cinematography. His politics were like the old-time, Jewish-liberal New York Post: anti-Communist, anti-racist, for-the-people.

The French and Germans praised Fuller, for putting the punch into cinema, for being unselfconscious in shooting and cutting in wild ways that they, European intellectuals, could never manage. They quoted shots from his movies (Jean-Paul Belmondo's blasting of a cop in Godard's Breathless is an homage to Fuller's Forty Guns), and they guest-starred the raspy-voiced, cigar-chomping, white-haired gent in some fine pictures. He's a gangland killer in Wenders's The American Friend, and he's himself at a party in Godard's Pierrot le fou, where he offers his oft-quoted definition: "The film is like a battleground: love, hate, action, violence, death. . . . In one word, emotion."

Fuller loved to talk. In his last decades, he appeared on countless panels (locally, he held forth at the Harvard Film Archive), where the garrulous, crowd-pleasing, old guy unwound with long (and occasionally long-winded and repetitive: say it again, Sam) yarns about the picture business. At home in the Hollywood Hills, Sam opened his doors to practically anyone. He read young filmmakers' scripts for free, critiquing them in his hardboiled, pragmatic way.

I was privy to his hospitality as I visited one day in the LA '80s. We sat in his lethal office (years of cigar puffing), where he entertained me with his recipes for effective filmmaking. "Gerry! Think about it!" he barked, twinkle in his eyes, slapping my knee with excitement, "Richard Nixon standing in a phone booth! Now that's thrilling! That's A MOVIE!!"

His movies are explanation points also, sweaty Westerns like Forty Guns and Run of the Arrow, exuberantly low-class newspaper sagas like Park Row and Scandal Sheet, paranoid "noirs" like Pickup on South Street, gritty men-in-war tales like The Steel Helmet and China Gate. His two subterranean-famous movies are the most delirious and semi-insane: The Naked Kiss, which concerns a child molester and naked-headed hookers, and Shock Corridor, in which a reporter investigates a murder in a mental institution and goes bonkers himself, being sexually attacked by the insatiable female patients.

"Nymphos!" the reporter yells out. Only the late Sam Fuller would have the guts for a one-word line like that!

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A Life Apart: Hasidism in America, playing at the Coolidge Corner, was directed by Menachem Daum, who resides in a Brooklyn Chassidic community, and Oren Rudavsky, a secular Jew whose father was a Reform rabbi. The film is a much-argued attempt by the moviemakers to locate a common ground between their disparate views of Chassidism. Ordinarily, such a balancing act means a bland, neutered documentary. But in the case of A Life Apart, Daum and Rudavsky have arrived at a miraculous way to tell the tale of American Chassids, so that virtually every image shimmers with ambiguity.

Are these people Jehovah's Chosen? Or are they a sexist, homophobic, suffocatingly conservative near-cult?

Some praiseworthy things shown about Chassids: the pious, totally religious way of life, the enviably close families, the warmth and wit and intelligence of those who agreed to be interviewed. Two of my favorites Chassids: a hilarious butcher, and a teacher at an Orthodox high school who serves as the ice-hockey coach. A Life Apart also gives space to reasonable critics of Chassidism: an articulate young black man who resents their religious elitism; a Reform woman rabbi who, giving comfort in a hospital, has been shunned by the Chassids; a young feminist woman who needed to leave the Chassidic community into which she was born.

And what of the decision of many American Chassids to have endless children, sometimes 14 or 15 in a family? Is that a wondrous rejoinder to Hitler, who killed four out of five Chassids, showing that Judaism can't be stopped? Or is it a bit eerie? A Life Apart ends at a gargantuan Chassidic wedding, in which a cast of seemingly thousands of men in black overflow the frame. Is the shot celebratory or cautionary? Depends on the vantage of the viewer.

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I'm one of the people bringing the extraordinary Dutch film Johanna Ter Steege to Boston for her first American retrospective. She'll be speaking with The Vanished (the original) at BU's College of Communications December 5 (call 353-3483); then she moves to the Harvard Film Archive for a December 6-7 weekend of screenings. Check "Film Listings" and "Film Strips" for a schedule of her HFA appearances. She's a smart, charming speaker: see you there!