The Westerns of Samuel Fuller

Cult director Samuel Fuller was not one of the more prolific exponents of our noble genre – he directed just four big-screen Westerns. But he was a significant one. His Western output is distinctive – and divisive. Fans include filmmakers from Godard and Wenders to Scorsese and Tarantino. Detractors include our own Jeff Arnold, who wrote on this site that:

“I am far from a Fuller fan. Cinéastes love him, especially here in France, where they can be rather pretentious about movies… and they are inveterate auteuristes, foolishly ascribing all creative input on a motion picture to the director. Still, as Fuller often directed, wrote and produced his pictures, which had certain arty tendencies (to offset the sensational subject matter), I suppose they sometimes had a point. In any case Fuller is admirable as far as the Frenchies are concerned. Myself, I find his Westerns lurid and cheap looking.”

Jeff certainly had a point but was perhaps being just a little too sweeping. Fuller brought some genuinely new things to the Western party, they just aren’t everyone’s cup of tea. As Jeff suggests, Samuel’s movies are a strange and heady brew: their offbeat, frequently sensationalist storylines somehow manage to mix nuggets of provocative social commentary with generous helpings of lurid pulp, while visually the films do indeed have frequently arty – even experimental – touches.

Mr Fuller evidently led a full life. Born to a Jewish family in 1912 he was filing crime reports for New York newspapers by the age of 17 and later got into writing pulp novels, eventually making his way to Hollywood as a
screenwriter. His creative career was interrupted by army service – he saw heavy action across Europe and Africa – but on his return to Hollywood, he eventually got the chance to step into the director’s chair under the aegis of producer Robert Lippert. See Jeff’s fine piece on Lippert for an overview of that unpretentious low-budget producer’s career, in which Westerns played a big part. And indeed, Fuller’s first two directorial efforts were entries into our noble genre. Unusual ones at that.

First up was I Shot Jesse James (1949) about which Jeff actually writes quite kindly, if not exactly enthusiastically, considering it Fuller’s best Western (a low bar, he argues). It’s if nothing else an interesting twist on the Jesse James legend. The twist being its sympathetic focus on James’ erstwhile protege and eventual killer Bob Ford and its noir-ish concentration on his confused psychological state. There’s even some quite strong hints of homoeroticism in Jesse’s and Bob’s relationship. Ford is played by John Ireland, who as usual is excellent. The photography is pretty good, and Fuller makes, for the time, unusually heavy use of intense close-ups. The main downside of the film is that, for a Western, it’s a little short on action.

Next came The Baron of Arizona (1950). Now this has an unusual premise. Vincent Price is a land office clerk who hatches an ambitiously intricate plot to gain possession of Arizona, not yet a state, by adopting an orphan girl (whom he goes on to marry years later – which brings a bit of an ick factor to this movie) and forging documents to ‘prove’ she is the Spanish heir to the territory. While not totally sold on this film, Jeff is not too down on it either, considering Price its strongest point, which is correct, but pointing out that it’s really only a half-western: the first half is gothic melodrama set partly in Spain, where Price skulks around menacingly, laying his plans.

But in the second half, he’s back in Arizona putting them into effect and we’re watching a proper, though unconventional, oater. Price’s performance has all his diabolic charisma (he’s sporting a superbly coiffed Luciferian beard) but also a surprising subtlety: there’s something admirable as well as evil about the protagonist. Then there’s the intriguing relationships between Price and his wife and between him and his antagonist, investigating his crimes, who have a begrudging, beguiling mutual respect. As Jeff notes, the cinematography by James Wong Howe, one of the best DPs in Hollywood history, is at times brilliant. Western-wise, the film has hats, horses, a modicum of punch-ups, the whole question of statehood and land ownership (key themes in our noble genre) and, the highlight, a climactic lynching sequence. For all that, the film is just a bit too slow and too talky – criticisms you couldn’t make of most of Fuller’s movies.

The writer-director spent the next five years concentrating on other genres to which he was perhaps better suited: war movies and noir-ish urban thrillers. His final film for Lippert was The Steel Helmet, his first war film and definitely his most accomplished effort so far, following which he upgraded to Fox and rather bigger budgets. His only Western contribution in that period was co-writing The Command (1955), directed by veteran journeyman David Butler, a film your humble scribe has yet to see but which Jeff Arnold judged an average production at best.

Fuller went on to start his own production company, making his next two Westerns under his own employ. His return to the saddle was during his busiest year, 1957, when no fewer than three Fuller films were released, including two typically eccentric contributions to our noble genre: Run of the Arrow and Forty Guns. Both films were shot – very well – by the talented Joseph Biroc, the first in vivid Technicolor, the second in the slightly unusual combination of (super-crisp) black-and-white Cinemascope.

In preparing this career write-up, it was a surprise to find that Jeff had never got round to posting a review of Run of the Arrow. But clearly he had seen it, and his various remarks on it made in passing when reviewing other films are, shall we say, not exactly ambivalent. For example: ‘absolutely dire, with Rod Steiger overacting even more than usual’. But hear me out: I think this film has some points in its favour. It starts well, with a striking pre-credits sequence in which the final bullet of the US Civil War is fired by the Steiger character, an Irishman from Virginia who then refuses to accept the South’s surrender and disavows his own Americanism for most of the movie, falling in instead with the one group of people still fighting the US army: the Sioux. They, interestingly, are neither depicted as savages nor idealised: like white society, theirs is presented as valid, complex, and far from perfect. Fuller seems to be making some sort of statement with this film, something to do with the US nation being a patchwork of different identities brought together – often through violence, but ultimately becoming more than the sum of its parts. Which is pretty interesting in theory but the film is done down by more than a few errors of execution. The key ones being in casting. Jeff was spot on about Steiger. He’s awful! Not only is he hamming it up something crazy but he’s also doing it with the most Iudicrous attempt at an Irish brogue ever captured on film. One can only imagine the mocking laughter when this film played in Dublin cinemas! And then there’s Fuller’s bizarre decision to cast Jay C. Flippen as an elderly, wisecracking Indian. What in blazes was Sam thinking? Usually a reliable, reassuring presence in Westerns, the very, very white Flippen, sporting not just makeup but also a ridiculous black wig, can’t begin to convince as a Native American. This said, there are some very pleasing performances by fine actors in more minor roles: Brian Keith as a thoughtful Army captain, Olive Carey in a cameo as Steiger’s mother (a role reminiscent of the one she’d done in The Searchers the previous year) and a dignified bit from Tim McCoy, once a hero of the silent Western screen, as an Army General. Ralph Meeker, not for the first time, convincingly plays a total heel, and Charles Bronson is one of the Sioux (your reviewer is generally a little warmer towards Bronson than was Jeff). Casting issues aside, the film doesn’t really gel. There’s some good stuff visually: stunning aerial shots by Biroc, gripping fast-moving close-up shooting of the ‘run of the arrow’ itself (you need to watch the film to understand its title), and some unusually violent action for the time. But there’s also a lot of slow, clunky dialogue scenes that really drag the movie down and don’t particularly hang together. Altogether it’s more of an interesting film to write about than to actually watch, and arguably Fuller’s weakest Western.

And so to Forty Guns, the climax of Samuel Fuller’s Western career and the most divisive film of the lot. Let’s not waste too much web space on the plot – you need to watch it, really, to experience its full madness, but suffice to say that Barbara Stanwyck stars as a black-clad landowner, ‘a high-riding woman with a whip’, who has a forty-strong team of hired guns working for her and develops a love / hate relationship with a gunslinger played by Barry Sullivan. Double entendres abound: frankly, e-pards, this movie isn’t in the best of taste. In fact, it’s sort of a mirror image to Run of the Arrow, which had some interesting themes but poor execution. Forty Guns rattles along at a fast pace, it’s super stylish, including several quite stunningly set up scenes – the numbers and types of camera angles framed by Biroc are off the charts – but this time all of it completely hangs together within its own excessive style. But all while seeming to almost make a point of having nothing to say. It’s as if Fuller had decided to do nothing more than take a bunch of Western conventions and exaggerate them, weird-ise them, and generally have fun with them for no better reason than the exaggerations, weirdness and fun themselves. The result is a movie that many adore and just as many abhor. Jeff Arnold being, very firmly indeed, in the latter camp. Check out his review: having given the film a couple of tries he concluded that it was ‘pretty well junk’. For Jeff and likeminded viewers, this is not really a Western at all but almost a mockery of Westerns. Basically, Forty Guns lacks the nobility that is so essential to our noble genre. As do many Italian Westerns, and we all know what Jeff thought about those. It undeniably anticipated and influenced them – not least with its extreme close-ups, which are way more stylised than those in I Shot Jesse James.

Well, e-pards, you must make up your own minds. Jeff’s objections are well-founded, and yet… there’s no denying that this movie’s quite a ride.

There are two Western postscripts to the Fuller story. In 1961, he was hired to direct an episode of major TV show The Virginian entitled It Tolls for Thee. Your scribe (no spring chicken, but still much too young to have caught that series first time round) has not been able to see this episode, but you can find a one-minute clip and several stills on its IMDB page. At 75 minutes it’s barely shorter than many of Fuller’s features (Forty Guns clocks in at 80, for instance) and sounds like it’s well worth checking out, if only because it guest stars a favourite of many JAW readers: Lee Marvin, starring as the villainous antagonist to series regular Lee J Cobb, playing a judge. Lee M and Sam F apparently bonded over their WW2 experiences, many of them harrowing, and nearly twenty years later Marvin would star in Fuller’s ambitious comeback movie The Big Red One (1980) drawing on such experiences.

Fuller’s final Western tour of duty was a rapidly curtailed one. He’d written a Western novel called Riata, which he then turned into a screenplay that he was hired to direct but soon left the production, apparently due to star Richard Harris’ dislike of the script and uneasy relationship with Fuller and the studio’s disappointment with Fuller’s rushes. Rewritten so as to apparently bear scant resemblance to Sam’s original script, the film saw the light of day under the title The Deadly Trackers (1973), directed by someone called Barry Shear (no, me neither…). Jeff gives this movie a highly negative review and there appears to be no one out there disagreeing with him.

And so that was that as far as Samuel Fuller Westerns were concerned. In fact, his career had slowed down altogether since about 1963. Oddly, there seemed to be more space for his maverick individualism in the dying days of the Hollywood studio system, albeit its lower echelons, than in the industry of the 1970s, despite him having many fans among the ‘Movie Brats’ then revolutionising American filmmaking. But he did get to make a handful more films in the 1980s including at least two major ones: the aforementioned powerful war epic The Big Red One, and the anti-racist allegory White Dog (1982) which, by the way, was scored by Ennio Morricone of Spaghetti fame.

Indeed, Fuller’s best stuff was surely non-Western – films set in his own times, like Fixed Bayonets, Pickup on South Street, Shock Corridor and The Naked Kiss. But his handful of contributions to our noble genre are still essential viewing for Westernistas. You may not like them all – in fact, it’s possible you’ll hate every single one and won’t fancy a second viewing. But you won’t forget them in a hurry.