Samuel Fuller (August 12th, 1912 - October 30th, 1997) was the first generation son of Jewish immigrants from Russia, and was born in Worcester, Massachusetts, but raised in New York City. He spent his teens working in the newspaper industry, as both a copy boy and, eventually, reporter. During the Depression, he quit for awhile to simply "ride the rails" in the South for a bit. In 1935, he settled into a career as a novelist, writing books with titles like "Test Tube Baby". Soon after he became a ghostwriter in Hollywood, doing polishing work on several scripts. Then the war came.
Fuller enlisted in the army during WWII, serving as a corporal in the division nicknamed "The Big Red One", after the number that was stitched into their shoulder patches. The war had a profound effect on him. He received a Bronze Star, a Silver Star, and a Purple Heart, but by the end of the war he had seen things that would effect him for life; notably, the liberation of the Falkenau, a German concentration camp. Several of his later works would be tainted, and gifted, by his pessimistic outlook on the world.
Upon his return to the states, he jumped right back into his movie career. He got his first chance to direct with the western I Shot Jesse James, followed soon after by The Baron Of Arizona, but it was his third film, Steel Helmet, that would really set his career in motion. Released in 1951 on a budget of roughly 100 grand, it went on to gross over six million dollars. The first fictional feature about the Korean War, it pulls no punches in it's depiction of the horrors of battle, such as when US soldiers end up killing one of their prisoners. Right out the gate, Fuller had made himself the center of controversy.
Fuller reached the peak of his notoriety in the mid-sixties, with the one-two punches of Shock Corridor (1963) and The Naked Kiss (1964). The former, about an journalist who goes undercover in an insane asylum, remains Fuller's most potent and outrageous statement about the ills of society. Naked Kiss is almost the opposite; the story of a prostitute who integrates herself into the "mainstream", only to discover that it's even more corrupt than the world she left behind. These stories were a bit too caustic for Hollywood, and America at large, so his output became sparse from this point on.
In 1980, he had a brief resurgence with his autobiographical war movie The Big Red One, which, while drastically cut down from his original version (that can now be found on DVD), garnered enough good will that it seemed his career might be back on track. Then, the final nail; White Dog. A movie about a dog that was trained to kill black people by racists, who Paul Winfield's character makes his mission to deprogram. The perception, accurately or not, was that black audiences would find it offensive, so it never got a proper theatrical release in the United States. For years, you could only see it in college film classes, until Criterion released it uncut on DVD in 2008.
A controversial figure to this day, he still remains highly influential, with directors such as Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino and Jim Jarmusch citing him as a major influence on their work. I'll be honest; I'm not the biggest fan. I find his lack of technical prowess to be distracting, and his messages can get pretty heavy-handed at times. But, he's a "love him or hate him" kind of dude, so don't take my word for it; check some of his movies out for yourself.
ESSENTIAL WORKS: Shock Corridor, The Naked Kiss, The Big Red One
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