There’s an exhilaration that comes from watching a Sam Fuller picture. You know it’s Fuller who wrote it. You know he was the one barking from behind the camera between cigar puffs. You know he took pieces of his own experiences - maybe something from the newspaper days or his time in WWII - and let them explode across the screen. His quotes about what a film’s first scene should accomplish and the Pierrot le fou bit expressing what makes up cinema are iconic enough to mention without repeating, but those ideas, his filmmaking philosophy, are remarkably evident in most of Fuller’s movies. They crackle with a readiness to please the audience through cinematic language instead of paternalistic placation. He gets the “pulp” label sometimes, maybe some view it more as camp and we all weep for those people, but I really see it more as the essence of cinema. There aren’t heavy nuances or ambiguities to Fuller’s work on film. You won’t encounter quite as many layers as found in some of the things by Nick Ray or Douglas Sirk. Still, the surfaces, fascinating as they often are, only tell part of the story.

Fuller was keenly adept at grabbing the viewer with the pulpiest of methods through ample violence and sexual innuendo. (The Barbara Stanwyck-Barry Sullivan encounter in Forty Guns where she inquires about his gun is probably the most overt display of double entendre-laden verbal naughtiness I’ve seen from a 1950s film, and I’m comfortable in thinking nothing surpassed it.) He could insert politics freely and with little rebuttal considering he fought for his country in bloody combat. When Fuller took the Red Scare proponents to task via Skip McCoy’s “Are you waving the flag at me?” in Pickup on South Street it wasn’t just subversive liberal protest. A guy who saw the water turn red at Omaha Beach and lived to tell about it could damn well question the insulated rabble-rousers. Fuller’s films were never shy about what their creator thought. They were (and are) courageous and bold, concerned only with fulfilling his twin commitments to the audience and himself.

If you read Fuller’s autobiography A Third Face, and you should, it becomes clear that much more work from him really should have been made, and that various bumps in the road restricted a potentially staggering output. Nick Ray’s semi-autobiography is entitled I Was Interrupted and you could almost have called Fuller’s book I Was Ignored given how much of a struggle it became for him to both get projects off the ground after the early 1960s and to get his vision onto the screen throughout his career. I tend to connect Ray and Fuller because the two men put so much of themselves into their films and both skillfully overcame the cookie-cutter nature of Hollywood in the 1950s to produce one vividly personal masterpiece after another when the studio wasn’t interfering. Fuller was able to gain new life decades later with The Big Red One and White Dog while Ray never fully got another shot, but their work over a fifteen-year period or so remains definitive of that era. Some of the films they made are sufficient evidence that the fifties were indeed a highly interesting, often shocking decade for American movies. The two directors also shared notable admirers in Jean-Luc Godard and Wim Wenders, among others, with the latter even putting both (separately) in his The American Friend.

But where Ray was filled with empathy and deep romanticism, Fuller had little problem driving a wedge between most all of his characters’ romantic entanglements. There are precious few Fuller affairs where the lovers actually end up together. When necessary, he could be unapologetic in showing coldness across any number of films, from the obvious I Shot Jesse James and through Forty Guns, Pickup on South Street and The Naked Kiss. It wasn’t that Fuller was in any way sadistic or angry in his depiction of romance, but his heart was more with realism, admittedly skewed through a distinctively tough and often madness-pitched prism, than the cooing fantasy ideal. He told stories not fairy tales. By working within various genres, mostly war movies, crime dramas and westerns, Fuller could maintain that lack of compromise (to a point) while still pleasing the thrill seekers who wanted their cinematic bullet points. I think what sometimes nags at those who don’t particularly care for Fuller is the visceral way he preferred to punch almost everything through instead of subtly letting the viewer recognize the particulars himself. It’s rare for much intricacy to exist in a Sam Fuller movie.

Seeing what he could do with Underworld U.S.A., a 1961 film made for Columbia where Fuller literally started with a title and went from there, makes for a persuasive alternative to the overly plotted entries (which I still love) in the crime genre. A 14-year-old sees his father beaten to death in an alley and vows revenge on the four attackers. Boy becomes man (Cliff Robertson) and gets himself into trouble to track down the men. That’s it. That’s the plot, 99-minutes’ worth. There are accents on this basic idea, but it’s the icy focus of Robertson’s character and a genius plot device which enables him to accomplish his goal within the margins of the law that really drive the film. Prior to watching Underworld U.S.A., I wasn’t sure whether Fuller would really be able to hold my attention since the revenge idea, despite having a timeless appeal to our sense of retribution, has been done so often and particularly in the decades after this was made. He does. Of course Fuller wouldn’t approach material of this sort like anyone before and after. My concerns were silly.

What lets the film thrive amid a crowded landscape of similar ideas is, firstly, Fuller’s storytelling, but just as important is his protagonist Tolly Devlin, played by Robertson in his first starring role. Tolly is no one’s idea of a hero. He’s essentially a calculating thug playing both sides (the government and organized crime) against each other for his own benefit. Yet, the game Fuller has constructed allows Tolly to be far preferable to the men he’s after, and his actions often resist judgment in the face of a vengeance most everyone would, on some level and at some point, desire if put in the same situation. Tolly is such a closed figure in his pursuit of these men that Fuller doesn’t even let us really stomp around in the muck he’s created. There’s minimal empathy to be had, making the film somewhat troubling in its narrative focus. Certainly Fuller is presenting Tolly as the hero or protagonist of the story, and the director’s frequent distrust of authority and law enforcement is in full bloom here, but I’m not sold on accepting Tolly’s actions as tolerable. Importantly, Fuller doesn’t seem to always be either, and this makes the film all the more interesting as a result.

The necessary monkey wrench is Dolores Dorn as beautiful, damaged blonde Cuddles. Tolly incidentally rescues her. His motivations are partially, perhaps mostly, self-serving. At times it seems like he has overlooked any potential for romance on solely practical terms. Other actions indicate he’s just not interested in her, maybe since she’s a distraction or, as he alludes to in one scene with his caretaker (Beatrice Kay), because Cuddles is no stranger to men. In dismissing Cuddles’ attention, including one memorably staged scene in a park which begins with her provocatively sucking on a piece of ice, Tolly struggles to recognize both his own obvious negatives and a future where his longstanding goal, occupying over half his life at this point, will be completed. I think this is where Fuller tips his hand most obviously in the direction of Tolly. These are the humanizing emotions which eventually stagger out of an otherwise vulgar and, frankly, vile character. Fuller sympathized with crazed determination. Along with the cynical survivor, the other half of Fuller’s male protagonists - and you could argue that these two types also revealed much about the director himself - were in the mold of Tolly or Shock Corridor’s Johnny Barrett.

Even with the relationship Fuller sets up between Tolly and Cuddles and the hot-blooded motivation in going after what are undeniably wretched men (the three of which are given representational avatars signifying that each controls his own realm of criminal activity, thus making the men embody the full respective evils of narcotics, labor and prostitution), Tolly remains the director’s most difficult and ambiguous hero. This may be less instructive of Fuller’s mindset at the time than a product of circumstance surrounding, as mentioned, the movie literally being built around a title, as well as the original idea Fuller had come up with being rejected by the studio and an actor in Robertson who was just breaking into leading man territory but still comfortable enough to embrace an antihero role. (As an aside, Robertson was the guest star on an episode of television’s The Untouchables where he made quite the impression as a psychotic killer cursed with a terribly ugly appearance until he underwent plastic surgery; I can see some of those same murderous wheels turning inside Tolly.)

Fuller describes in his book the entire opening sequence he envisioned for the film but which didn’t meet the studio’s approval. It’s an incendiary scene which probably would’ve failed to see release even if he had filmed it (though this version of the movie was prior to it being Tolly’s story). A close-up on a beautiful young woman’s back is pulled out to reveal numerous scantily clad prostitutes positioned to mimic a United States map. One of the women gives a speech detailing the “Union of Prostitutes” which would do away with pimps and allow cab fares and laundry bills to be tax-deductible, presumably as business expenses. It would all be legalized. After a forceful display of the film’s title, we move with the speaker into a dressing room where the muzzle of a gun enters her mouth and fires, her head exploding. Fuller then wanted the plot to revolve around a loner looking for revenge (like Tolly, but with obvious differences) who joins one of the other prostitutes (similar to the Cuddles character) to bring down persons of power across the criminal spectrum. While some of the same themes and ideas were carried into the existing version of Underworld U.S.A., what a shame to have missed out on that opening in favor of the much more conventional, Batman-like introduction with a child seeing a parent murdered and vowing revenge.

Maybe not even ten years later and Fuller could have had the opening he wanted. The ever-evolving Hollywood carousel seemed to never quite let Sam on at the right time. Fuller’s absurd balance of anachronism and modernity in his films remains downright strange. It may be part of why people get that feeling of camp from them. Look deeper and I think you’ll find a unique filmmaking style based around the excitement of experience with the itchy desire to share and a fascination with thematically mature, adult undercurrents. There’s virtually no one in the filmmaking pantheon I’m familiar with who can claim those same primary interests, thus putting Fuller in a difficult position for pigeonholing. Refreshing, yes? So, for example, while Underworld U.S.A. and The Naked Kiss look and feel like film noir, both came after the cycle ended with Touch of Evil, placing them really more within what I’d called postnoir alongside Odds Against Tomorrow and Blast of Silence, among others. Fuller’s films also predict some of the cheap, grindhouse-type of cinema that came out of the ’70s. His multitasking commitment to an individual aesthetic and reluctance to compromise would fit better with the independent-friendly ’80s or ’90s than when Fuller was playing against the studios decades earlier. Here was a guy who had to self-finance his fifth film even though his first four had made money for other people. In 1952! While the adoption of some of the most basic storytelling techniques isn’t unique to Fuller’s work, the infectious joy often emanating from it and the determined yet sophisticated support for tolerance and equality found at the heart of his plots has rarely been equaled.

(While not currently available on DVD, Underworld U.S.A. has been penciled in to be released later this year in Sony’s Sam Fuller Film Collection.)