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COPYRIGHT 2002 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
"They love me in France" is the last, best hope of a Hollywood filmmaker in search of a second act. This refrain is the farcical residue of an aesthetic revolution that shook France half a century ago. In the nineteen-fifties, Francois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, and their fiercely intellectual circle of young Parisian film critics hailed certain Hollywood directors who were generally considered craftsmen (like Howard Hawks) or showmen (like Alfred Hitchcock) as artists of the first order and--despite the compromises inherent in studio filmmaking--as the sole "authors" of their films. The controversy provoked by this paradoxical politique des auteurs helped these critics to break into the field as directors themselves. They quickly won fame under the rubric of the French New Wave, and the American filmmakers they championed became culture heroes in France.
Besides Jerry Lewis (who really is as good as they said he is), the prime beneficiary of this adulation was probably Samuel Fuller. American critics tended to see Fuller, who was making movies during this period with titles like "Hell and High Water," as just another director of low-budget action films; but the young French enthusiasts recognized him as one of the most original filmmakers working at the time. Godard, writing in a 1957 article for Cahiers du Cinema about Fuller's Western "Forty Guns," compared his extravagant inventiveness to that of Erich von Stroheim; in 1959, Luc Moullet, also a Cahiers critic and future director, extolled him as the Marlowe to Orson Welles's Shakespeare.
Although Fuller's acclaim abroad never really boosted his status here (except among cinephiles, who followed the French lead), it exerted an odd and uniquely powerful influence on his career and on his life. At the very least, it is safe to say that "A Third Face: My Tale of Writing, Fighting, and Filmmaking" (Knopf; $35), Fuller's posthumously published autobiography--the director died five years ago--would not have come about without the French enthusiasm for his work.
Fuller was born in 1912, to working-class Eastern European-Jewish immigrant parents, in Worcester, Massachusetts. In 1923, his father died and his mother brought her seven children to New York. At the age of twelve, Samuel started working as a copy boy on William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal, and hustled to become personal copy boy to the editor-in-chief. Energetic, ambitious, and precociously curious about the city's underside, he left the respected Journal and became, at the age of seventeen, a full-fledged crime reporter on the New York Evening Graphic--a photo-heavy paper of such spectacular sensationalism that it was nicknamed "the Pornographic." To appear older, Fuller started smoking cigars, which became his enduring trademark. Fuller's crime reporting provided what he later called his "hellbox" of insider information on the stool pigeons, gangsters, pickpockets, prostitutes, corrupt cops, and perverts whose exploits would be his cinematic stock in trade. It also provided him a rude schooling in the photographic craft, as Fuller noticed that "from the same cadaver, each photographer obtained a different, singular result, according to the angle, the light."
In 1931, at the age of eighteen, Fuller decided that he wanted to write the Great American Novel. In quest of a different sort of gritty realism, he bummed his way across the country by truck and freight train with his typewriter tied to his back, earning a living as a cartoonist and freelance journalist. The effects of the Depression were everywhere; Fuller reported on strikes, race riots, and the daily struggles of the homeless, whose Hooverville shantytowns he made his hostels. Then his brother became gravely ill, and he returned to New York, where he...
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