OUTSIDER CINEMA: SAM FULLER AND MONTE HELLMAN

NOTE: I found this essay in my files the other day. I wrote it in 2003, and by rights it should have been in my late lamented Crime Time column, but I have the feeling I might have been saving it for the first isue of Kamera, where I had a number of articles but not this. So here it is now, two B-movie toned studies of two of my favourite directors.

Lee Server’s book on Sam Fuller is really three small books in one, much like Fuller’s small but excellently formed B movies which he made in the 1950s. The first part is an interview with Fuller, who gives good copy as he goes through his career, which includes some remarkable films, some forgettable ones, and many which in retrospect appear to be object lessons in how to use film to tell a story.  The second part is an analysis by Server of the films: he is a solid critic, helped by his understanding of the man and his ability to put the individual films into the context of Fuller’s wider career.  Finally there are interviews with people who worked with Fuller on his films.  As cinematographer Joe Biroc says, ‘Some of his ideas were so crazy!’.  It’s funny how time and the critics have recognised Fuller’s special genius, but in the context of his times in Hollywood he was considered an energetic, talented, off-beat guy whose talent extended no further than B pix.  This was the way Richard Widmark, who starred in two Fuller films, including Pickup On South Street, which is arguably his best, described him to me when I interviewed him for the FT.  Widmark meant it with great affection and respect.

Fuller’s own cut of The Big Red One has been released recently, establishing him posthumously as an A director, certainly a benchmark for Spielberg and others who are lauded for ‘reinventing’ the war movie.  His crime films are extraordinary, starting with I Shot Jesse James, which is closer to White Heat than Stagecoach in tone.  It’s not that Fuller is a consummate pulpster, although he is. A film like House of Bamboo, ostensibly a remake of the noir classic Street With No Name, has everything that makes the original so great: betrayal, a strong homosexual undercurrent between the boss and his (betraying) new henchman, and gang violence. But it adds layers of cultural and racial clashing, uses of sexuality, and an implied comparison between the Army culture and the criminal underworld that make it a fully developed and satisfying story.  So too his other ‘Japanese’ film, The Crimson Kimono, in which the audience’s expectations for the white LA cop and his Nisei partner are constantly being reversed. 

That is the key to Fuller: he is always surprising.  Is there a more off-beat yet successful western than Forty Guns? (well, maybe, Johnny Guitar, but no matter) It’s what makes Fuller so important and what makes this book so entertaining. But it never answers the question I’ve been dying to know since I saw The Naked Kiss and realised there was another character named Griff.  There are Griffs in six Fuller films.  Why?

***

Monte Hellman is in some ways the antithesis of Fuller, even though stylistically you might say he follows in Sam's footsteps.  But where Fuller went his own way, content to write, direct and produce B features that left him with a relative amount of artistic freedom, Hellman has bounced all around the movie business, leaving footprints all over the town, but with only a few films credited to him as a director.  Some of those films are cult classics, and for good reason: The Shooting (written by Carol Eastman) and Ride The Whirlwind (written by Jack Nicholson) were shot back to back in 1966 for Roger Corman. The two westerns are darker takes on Budd Boetticher more than Fuller; both star Nicholson and Millie Perkins, and remain seriously underrated, if not ignored.  Even better, to my mind, is China 9 Liberty 37, released in 1978 with Warren Oates, Fabio Testi, Jenny Agutter and Sam Peckinpah (yes, Sam Peckinpah!), which combines Hellman’s own Sixties sensibility with another Sixties sensibility, that of a spaghetti western

This should be no surprise, since Sergio Leone himself offered Fistful Of Dynamite (aka Duck You Sucker) to Hellman (eventually Peter Bogdanovich tried to direct, then it was offered to Peckinpah, before Leone himself stepped back in), and Hellman is the guy who directed the ‘prologue’ sequence filmed for ABC television in the USA for Fistful Of Dollars. In this scene prison warden Harry Dean Stanton offers a back standing in for Clint Eastwood an amnesty if he will go clean up the town of San Miguel.  ABC had been unhappy with the moral ambiguity of the Man With No Name, and so settled for the Man With No Face!

All this would guarantee Hellman a spot in my personal Hall of Fame, but his cult reputation rests on two more films, both of which showcased Warren Oates (well, actually Oates stole the first one, but never mind).  First was Two Lane Blacktop, arguably the most over-hyped independent film in American history.  The screenplay by Rudy Wurlitzer was published as a complete issue of Esquire magazine, before the film was even released, billed as the greatest screenplay of all time.  It wasn’t, and the film could hardly live up to that kind of build up.  What it is is a portrait of American obsession on the road, and the model for any number of road movies (Spielberg's The Duel, anyone?) that followed.  Oates steals the show from crooner James Taylor, Beach Boy Dennis Wilson and one-hit wonder Laurie Bird, not that  hard to do, and battles the cars to a draw.

Oates gave the performance of a career in Hellman’s Cockfighter --based on the Charles Willeford novel--certainly one as intense as Alfredo Garcia, but more controlled.  The story of Frank Mansfield, who has taken a vow of silence until he wins the ’Cockfighter of the Year’ award, is another one of obsession, and a particularly American, frontier type of masculine obsession.   Hellman regular Stanton is joined by Troy Donahue, Perkins and Bird to make up an interesting cast of talented character actors and Hollywood burnouts, just the sort of group you might expect Hellman to assemble.

I say expect because the most interesting part of Stevens’ story is keeping track of all the uncredited editing, scripting, directing jobs which Hellman has done, and all the uncredited changes which have been made to his films, most notably Cockfighter.  It is the story of a Hollywood lifer, not quite a consummate player of the game, but certainly a player, where a bit of drive and a bit of charm and bit of chutzpah can get you a long way.  Hellman seems to have lived his life with one project or another at some stage of development, and that is a particular sort of hell which Stevens manages to keep within the context of the work by which Hellman will be remembered.

Sam Fuller: Film Is A Battleground by Lee Server (McFarland, £22.50, ISBN 0786417005)
Monte Hellman: His Life and Films by Brad Stevens (McFarland, £23.50, ISBN 0786414340)

OPTING FOR THE REAL: IN MEMORIAM KAREN BLACK

'People were opting for the real in the Seventies. People wanted to see the human heart and soul right in front of them.' -Karen Black

In an era of interchangeable pinups with blownup lips and botoxed faces, Karen Black's analysis of what made her such a remarkable actress at her very busy peak is telling. In fact, she may give too much credit to the filmmakers, and not enough to herself, because she was often the best thing in imperfectly judged projects, always giving her characters something that we, the audience, could recognise. There was nothing symmetric or regular about her features, but to look into those wandering eyes, especially when they were focused beyond the screen, on you, was to feel all the thrill and danger of real life and real love. On the dark side of a world celebrating newfound freedoms, she was the poster child for real people's vulnerability.

Karen Black projected real. She was smart, but she could play dumb, or better, play 'real people'- a category of character which Hollywood traditionally has ignored, or at best bent to its own perceptions ('tales of ordinary working people portrayed by rich Hollywood stars,' as the Firesign Theatre had it). She's best remembered for a number of roles in which she is an under-educated working-class woman whose innate knowledge makes her smarter than the men who use her. Think of Rayette in Five Easy Pieces, the perfect foil to Jack Nicholson's self-indulgent pianist, trying to find a 'real' life; she had played the hooker in Easy Rider, and Nicholson would cast her in his directorial debut, Drive, He Said, where as a bored faculty wife her intelligence came to the fore. She would also reprise Rayette in Cisco Pike, helping Kris Kristofferson's film debut, in a film where everyone else seems to be reprising older roles too.

She is brilliant as Myrtle Wilson, a trapped Rayette, in the unjustly derided 1974 version of The Great Gatsby, hugely superior to the over-hyped Baz Luhrman glitterfest. Oddly, much of the criticism for that film came from Jack Clayton's making it look so beautiful, which is about the only thing Luhrman's version has going for it. But Francis Ford Coppola's screenplay is sharp (Coppola cast Black in their mutual film debut, the overlooked You're A Big Boy Now, arguably Hollywood's first look at Sixties generational change—it was made before The Graduate but released after it) Black's Myrtel and Scott Wilson's George Wilson are real people, and they contrast with the equally real upper-class indifference of Bruce Dern's Tom Buchanan. Her Faye Greener, in The Day Of The Locust, is a successful variant of the same character; John Schlesinger's film was also criticised in 1975, but in retrospect it too stands up pretty well as an adaptation of Nathanel West's novel—if anything it to tried to catch the image of the era, where Black and many of the rest of the cast were busy catching the soul, or lack thereof, of Hollywood.

So it was strange that none of the many obituaries mentioned her role as Bett in The Outfit, John Flynn's 1973 adaptation of a Richard Stark novel. She's Rayette again, but she's paired with Robert Duvall's thief Macklin. She's wearing a beret before Gatsby, and the relationship is real within the limited bounds of their world. There is a truly touching phone call home at the center of the movie's last act, in which she reveals Bett's depths and sets up the film's denoument. One of my top-10 crime films, it's cast perfectly from top to bottom, but even in such company Black stands out.

And think of the many films in which she also stood out among casts of underperforming bigger stars, or in lackadaisical material: Portnoy's Complaint, Capricorn One (again with Dern), Hitchock's Family Plot, even in Nashville, where her country singer seems far more real than, say, Ronee Blakely's, and Blakely was a singer. She also tries hard but cannot save Altman's post-Nashville Come Back To The Five And Dime Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean.

Some of the obits referred to her in her later career as a 'scream queen', but she barely fits the modern definition, of B movie actresses who exist to be victimised while nearly naked. She might be typed in a tradition of What Happened To Baby Jane, or perhaps like Ingrid Pitt or Barbara Steele, stronger actresses who relished off-beat roles. In that I was reminded of Karen Steele, a 50s actress who came into films as a statuesque beauty queen, but often projected too much strength and intelligence to be cast comfortably in big pictures. Watch her in Ride Lonesome, and think what Karen Black could have done with a similar role. It's too glib to say she might have succeeded in an early era in Hollywood, in Bette Davis parts (that Bett in The Outfit isn't totally coincidental), but she was lucky in a sense to enter the business at a point where there were roles for her, and unlucky that the business changed so rapidly just when she should have been being offered roles playing women who were more in control. Roles outside horror films. Karen Black was a great actress, who should have been a star, and her death, by reminding us of so many 'how it was' and 'what might have beens' is made even sadder.

MARIA SCHNEIDER AND LAST TANGO IN PARIS

I was saddened, with the untimely death of Maria Schneider, who after all was younger than me, to see the way her obituaries tried to build a parallel, if not a cause and effect relationship, between her sometimes unhappy life and the role she played in Last Tango In Paris. Most of the obits referred to her as 'voluptuous', which was fair enough, although she was more 'large-breasted' than voluptuous in a Jayne Mansfield/Gina Lollabrigida sense. One even called her 'pillow-lipped', like some collagened porn star, as if confusing the film's reputation with some modern day interpretation.

The truth was that Schneider's appeal lay in the open innocence of her face, the wide eyes and child-like mouth, quick to pout, which contrasted with the lush softness of her body, as if it were not yet fully-formed. In that sense, she was a Shirley Temple for the Seventies, and in a sense that was what her role in Last Tango was all about. It is indeed a shame that what people remembered was the butter scene, though it's not surprising because the anal rape is meant to be shocking in its humiliation of her. It's sad that this image stuck with her all her life, forcing her to be defined by that moment of raw emotion disguised as explicit sex.

Schneider's Jeanne enters the film in literally full plumage; we have seen Brando (Paul) as a tormented character from a Bacon painting, all twisted up on himself; Jeanne is a creature of fantasy—already indulging her film-maker boyfriend, and trying to be what he wants her to be. Sadly, Jean-Pierre Leaud seems to want nothing from the real Jeanne. Thus the relationship she begins with Brando, for all its anonymity, is one whose desires are 'real', and come from his inside, not from her boyfriend's camera. Much of the movie is a gradual stripping of the plumage from Jeanne, and only after she has broken their rules and he has reduced her completely does Paul realise (or decide, or convince himself) that he is in love.

I'm never sure whether Bertolucci was saying that love is a tango, or that Paul's perception of love is a tango—a ritual whose steps must be followed precisely—but either way it works. If it is Paul's ritual, then we are talking about generational difference, which is the way I felt when I first saw the film in Sweden in 1973. If it's not, it benefits from a brilliant score by Gato Barbieri, which starts in the pain of jazz and blends it into the traditional mystery of the tango. Of course I was rooting for the younger generation, and 'free love', but I was aware that Paul's values, which may have driven his wife to suicide, could also be seen as American, as opposed to European. I've come to think that Bertolucci's intent may have been to make a more general point about love, but here he was caught in the perfect way Schneider fit the role, and the way in which he as a director combined the Leaud and Brando characters when it came to her.

Originally Dominique Sanda, slightly older than Schneider (in fact virtually exactly the same age as I am) was going to play the role, but she would have been more mature, more sophisticated, more an equal rather than an opposite to Brando. Schneider inhabits the role in a way that became dangerous...and the problem went deeper than just her sense of being abused by the director (and to a lesser extent, Brando). Bertolucci the director was far more Brando than Leaud with her, and the confusions that created must have made the role difficult for her. Her obits would have you believe she never played in another serious film after Antonioni's The Passenger, and she did make some shlock, but part of the problem is many of her films were never seen in the English-speaking world, and the bigger part of the problem was that she was not really an actress but a star who never got starring roles. Directors saw in her something they could use, that she could give or have bullied out of her, but she wasn't able to project beyond that something; not that she was given many chances.

The Passenger is almost eerily like like Last Tango—as if Schneider's presence, not Jack Nicholson's, were defining the film. Nicholson, like Brando, loses his identity while with Schneider; she exists primarily as a way to root his new identity, to create an option he doesn't necessarily realise he wants to take, because it might be following down the same route as his previous life. When I saw it again on its re-release last year I was struck by how restrained Schneider's performance seemed to be, as if she were not being asked to do much, as if Antonioni were satisfied by her mere presence. She did Rene Clement's The Baby Sitter in 1975, but quit Luis Bunuel's The Obscure Object of Desire (1977), which may have been because he too had a precise vision for her; so precise Bunuel famously needed two actresses to replace her.

By her own account, Schneider wasn't ready to be an international sex object, a second Sylvie Kristal or someone like that. With her erratic upbringing-- her actor father, Daniel Gelin, wouldn't acknowledge her until she was 15, by which time she was a model and extra and had been taken in by Brigitte Bardot. I can recall photos of her after a fight at a lesbian bondage club in the 1970s, stories about drugs and her being committed to institutions (once to be near a lover) and her obits made a big deal about her never revealing the gender of her long-term partner at the end of her life. The last film I saw her in was Zefferelli's Jane Eyre, where Charlotte Gainsbourg, another French 'wild child' whose career has worked out far more successfully, played Jane, and Maria was Mrs. Rochester—suitably mad when she finally made her appearance, but still intriguing enough to make you wonder what she'd seen in William Hurt (ironic, that name) and what Hurt's Rochester had done to her. Or perhaps whether she wasn't just Jeanne living out life as it might have been with Paul, or indeed even with her director boyfriend. The real sadness of Maria Schneider's life was that we never got the chance to see her rise beyond that first iconic role, and we'll keep her locked in that unfurnished apartment in Bir-Hakeim forever.