Samuel Fuller and Don Ameche in Hollywood, 1941: the writer-type and the actor-type.
The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it's indifference. The opposite of faith is not faith, it's indifference. The opposite of life is not death, it's indifference.
- Eli Weisel, quoted by Samuel Fuller in The Third Face.
If you told me up front that one third of Sam Fuller's autobiography was going to describe his experiences as a soldier in the Second World War, I might have given this book a pass - which would have been a real shame. Sam Fuller's understanding of war allowed him to call bullshit when he saw it. "Heroes? No such damned thing! You moved your ass one way, and you didn't get hit. You moved it another way, you were blown to bits. When the battle was underway, experience and intuition, not heroics, were useful," Fuller writes, recounting his experience at Omaha Beach. He later expresses his disdain for the phoney patriotism of John Wayne movies. While reading The Third Face, it struck me that Fuller's Hollywood neighbour and friend Quentin Tarantino must have heard some of these yarns before they made it to print. As he lays them out cinematically, Fuller's anecdotes seem hardly real. Nazis dressed as mourners and priests, holding a fake funeral in a vacated town, praying over four empty infants' coffins as an ambush strategy? Unbelievable! A soldier muttering "I love action movies," mesmerized by a cowboys and Indians movie poster he spotted on the wall during a bloody shootout with Nazis in a cinema in Aachen? This is right out of Inglorious Basterds!
Fuller's oeuvre is one of a man who wasn't afraid to say no. He refused to direct Patton, because he disliked the man. He wouldn't allow the studio to cast John Wayne as his sergeant in The Big Red One, his most personal work based on his wartime experiences (luckily he was later able to go ahead with the project, with Lee Marvin in the central role). But as Fuller himself points out, his films were never just about war -- he wrote thrillers, crime films and exotic love stories. Fuller's inability to compromise lead to B-movie territory. After the studio system completely dissolved, Fuller was left to drift professionally and the psychedelic 60s just seemed to puzzle (or at least depress) him. In 1982 his film White Dog was so controversial that it was shelved, at which point Fuller and his family decamped to Paris. Luckily, Fuller lived long enough (he died in 1997 in his 80s) to find himself well-appreciated by a new generation of directors that included Wim Wenders, Martin Scorcese, Quentin Tarantino and others.
Movie lovers who enjoy disappearing into the MGM fantasyland of film may find Fuller's works too gritty to enjoy. In his Biographical Dictionary of Film, David Thompson even goes so far as to question whether Fuller was aware of what he was doing as a director. Fuller's autobiography makes it very clear that he was completely aware of what he is doing. Sure, sometimes money, junior editors and cowardly studio execs made things difficult but he was very strongly propelled by a personal vision and managed to translate that into film time and again. "People continued trying to pigeonhole me as a lefty or a righty, and my work as being liberal or conservative, projecting their own notion on me. I wouldn't let them affect my deeply held belief system. Peace and ethics were my beacons."
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