Fuller By Two

Donald Phelps

Quiet Desperation
Samuel Fuller’s I Shot Jesse James

The first film directed by Samuel Fuller (1949) opens with a lurching, bumptious close-up of Jesse James (Reed Hadley) brandishing a pistol, as he and his accomplices enter a bank; a teller reaches for an alarm signal, and is shot dead. Later, James himself is gunned down, by his accomplice and good friend Bob Ford (John Ireland), from the rear. Within the final ten of the film’s eighty-one minutes, Ford will be brought to earth by Sheriff John Kelley (Preston Foster). I have just described the sum total of gunplay, indeed of physical violence, in what might rashly and over-dismissively be called an atypical Sam Fuller film; to me, among his best and, doubtless, among the outstanding Westerns of the forties. As a depiction/dismantling of the Frontier West, it is not far from the 1960 television series The Westerner, by that other prolific Samuel: Peckinpah.

The initial lowering close-up of Hadley/James is succeeded by an only moderately more distant shot: bearded and handsome, his face replicates the drawing on the ‘Wanted’ poster which accompanied the film’s credits along with ‘The Ballad of Jesse James’, an authentic favourite of the period. The mellow unction of Hadley’s voice recalls his early television role as narrator/host of the series Racket Squad. We are clearly watching the James myth: the iconography subsuming the man. Fuller himself, in an interview with Peter Bogdanovich, roundly declared that Bob Ford deserved a medal. Only minutes after James has announced his retirement from his lucrative career of theft and murder, we shall see him shot dead from the rear, while standing on a chair and adjusting a picture.

There follows a procession of views, starkly sober as a sequence of genre prints; the tone set by the groping, baffled, pavan-like gait of Bob Ford: a man slow and literal thinking, not exceedingly articulate, who commits an act of murderous betrayal for money and finds himself the sinecure of mistrustful awe and scorn which houses a sardonic reflection of his own self-bafflement.

The foregoing account, with minimal revision, will recall to many John Ford’s The Informer (1935), in which Victor McLaglen’s Gypo Nolan betrays his dearest friend and protector in the Sinn Fein. Gypo’s remorse however was uproarious spluttering, heaving, flinging his blood money to the winds of Dublin’s whorehouses and fish and chip shops. Ford’s Ireland in The Informer was as brassy and gesticulating as his Sahara in The Lost Patrol (1934). Wallace Ford’s luminous, harrowed performance was a grace note.

By contrast, John Ireland’s Bob Ford virtually drifts through the film, with slightly stooping shoulders seeming to inquire mutely of the world which he has inexplicably disrupted. In his black attire (the traditional villain’s garb of Westerns) he embodies the moral void that, Sam Fuller’s movies remind us again and again, can be exposed to the world, or vice versa, by any spasmodic faux pas. He seems in a lingering, all but mute state of shocked bafflement, like an amnesia victim trying to determine his whereabouts. Ireland’s performance is too subtle and finely sketched for an Academy Award exhibit. It places him, some decades late, among the notable silent movie actors: those who seemed to merge with the weaving of the film; embodying and projecting a consistent, prevailing tone rather than an assemblage of traits or tics.

Like the best of these actors, Ireland contributes a contrapuntal force that foregrounds the film’s theme: the intimation of a groping, submerged fury, founded in guilt, and the frantic awareness of being fatally, morally disoriented by his act: a shatterer of taboos and summoner of furies that he never knew existed. When asked by Bogdanovich whether Ford was supposed to have harboured a homosexual attachment to James, Fuller replied: ‘Yes’. In keeping with this assent, might one not suppose that Ford’s slaying of James following on James’ announcement of his intention to ‘retire’ from criminal life – might have been rooted in jealousy: the fear of profound deprivation? James’ action of straightening the picture an act of domestic propriety, deepened by the inflection of unconscious symbolism, in ‘straightening’ his life’s perspective – might thus have furnished, with its ominous assurance of closure, the trigger for Ford’s shot in the back: an act of lethal sodomy.

Acceptance of this interpretation, I think, effectively darkens the tone and makes more dense the texture of I Shot Jesse James. The film features a succession of blocked or averted occasions for violence on Ford’s part. Early on, he is seated in a local saloon, into which ambles an itinerant minstrel. He offers from his frontier hit parade ‘a song everybody likes’. It is ‘The Ballad of Jesse James’ which furnished the title theme. Its refrain evokes the shooting of ‘Mr Howard’ (James’ hideaway name) by ‘that dirty little coward’ Ford. Ford announces himself: commanding the now tremulous minstrel to continue the song. After the troubadour has winced and faltered his way though the lament, Ford rises, to the slightest discernible ripple of expectation in the immediate onlookers, and leaves. Later along in the film, Ford joins a travelling wagon show (run by J. Edward Bromberg) in which he decides to supplement his funds by re-enacting the assassination. At the debut of the plausibly crude performance (one notes the changes of one or two details; evidently Ford could not bring himself to give exact account) Ford’s harassed memory superimposes the ‘act’ with its prototype, and he freezes. Still later, flush with the wealth of a successful gold strike, Ford angrily accuses John Kelley (Preston Foster), a potential rival for the love of Cynthy Waters (Barbara Britton), of theft. The vignette was appropriated by Fuller from a lightweight biography of Bob Ford by minor journalist Homer Croy. Kelley responds with proof of his innocence, and in turn indignantly warns Ford against future accusations. Ford stiffens slightly – but what would seem the impending explosion does not occur. Another moment, involving the elderly prospector (Victor Kilian) who partners with Ford on the gold hunt will not be recounted here, to protect the brief scene’s impact: the editing, along with Kilian’s response, recalls the Hitchcock of British heydays.

In truth, the story of Bob Ford as retold by Fuller differs only fitfully from the often-muddled destinies of Fuller’s protagonists; many of whom either seek out or more often haphazardly accede to ill-fitting roles. One recurrently senses an underlayer of latent, potential farce; Destiny à la Fuller often seems a likely scenarist for Laurel and Hardy; yet, Fuller never patronises or manipulates, puppeteer style. His protagonists repeatedly find themselves simultaneously at odds with their own nature, and an ever more harrowing sense of cosmic dyslexia, vagrant absurdity, brandishing the slapstick of Death. Fuller recognises the imminence of the primitive in warfare, and in all circumstances that replicate those of warfare. Such awareness is manifest in the bedrock literalness of his observation.

Fuller tells Bob Ford’s segmented story with a patient, squinting deliberation. His consideration of small, gleaming details recalls to me Manny Farber’s phrase (apropos silent films): ‘sad, worn, methodical beauty’. After the fanfare of close-ups, Ford’s story is told largely in two-shots. The camera never ventures farther than middle distance (a repeated stock shot – a rider scurrying along a mountain pass – was, Fuller has attested, inserted by the studio without his approval). The threadbare skimpiness of the film’s demeanour – a by-product of Lippert Studio’s worthy poverty – works in good accord with the bony terseness of the narrative; likewise, the overall effect of being ‘backstage’ at the slow expiration of frontier legend.

The featured roles are hardly one-dimensional. Barbara Britton’s Cynthy (who provides both the ostensible motivation for Ford’s treachery – the reward money – then, in her horror at his act, a burden of grief and guilt) is primly gentle: a pallid heroine, especially in comparison with Mary Welch (Park Row [1952]) or Constance Towers (The Naked Kiss [1964]); J. Edward Bromberg, as the wagon show manager, is his typical Jewish Buddha while Preston Foster’s Kelley is a model or rockbound sturdiness.

The ensemble functions largely as a chorus of reactors to the bedevilled enigma that is Robert Ford. Yet, one may be too readily tempted to call on Euripidean classicism; and thus underrate Fuller’s Poverty Row journalist’s eye for peripheral human curiosa. The later movies throng with the quirky, faintly bizarre or merely casually appealing human phenomena that might draw the eye of cartoonist Ben Katchor’s Julius Knipl; not to mention Ben Hecht or Damon Runyon, or William Carlos Williams. A GI in Korea saves the dismembered ear of his buddy; a Communist agent, in a Chinese restaurant, accepts and pays for stolen documents with his chopsticks. A turn of the century barmaid with a tongue like a motorboat rudder mixes a Blue Blazer for the goons in the newspaper war.

With a delicacy that may appear at odds with his slam bang popular image, Fuller abstains from any farcical or patronisingly folksy exploitation of these fringe personae; yet, he knows how to wrinkle them of that slippery value, quaintness; oddity wearing the shell of its cultural origins. His minor figures supplement his stories not only by their diverting or arresting images but also, through the ways that they refract the moral entropy, the wayward crankiness of the moral microcosm in which his heroes find themselves.

The saga of Bob Ford offers us a less resplendent entourage than those of latter Fullers; but, like background figures in lithographs, they offer their taciturn, stark punctuation to the tragicomic text. One remembers, of course, the minstrel. Yet, seated in the immediate background during his confrontation with Ford, what of the several well-dressed men, who seem already to have identified Ford? The exchanged glances, and smiles of coldly amused irony, enter the composition like a razor edge. James’ murder is itself punctuated by the entrance of James’ wife who shakes her head in horrified disbelief: a silent augur. Later scenes, in a saloon, are graced by the singing of a tall girl, whose sweet, untrained voice teeters along the notes of Stephen Foster’s ‘Beautiful Dreamer’. The diverse barroom scenes are shot from identical perspective: behind, tilted slightly down.

Such portraits, however meagrely detailed, present in context a compact, vignetted autonomy; a casual dignity unmauled by hoked-up or folked-up trimmings. Fuller’s instinct for scale (i.e., smallness) takes command, here and throughout his subsequent career, helping him discern and portray the vein of meanness, of moral squalor, in actual combat circumstances: the besetting reductiveness of violence. His list of films displays much genre-hopping; but – like Dashiell Hammett, Jim Thompson or Donald Hamilton – Fuller leaves no genre as he found it. Unlike the current onslaught of totalitarian-spirited mayhem from Hollywood, Fuller’s movies do not brush off the human dimensions. The intimacy may, understandably, seem incongruous: nearly archaic.

Viewed in the context of such subsequent work, I Shot Jesse James’ latent mood of black farce is more easily identified. So, too, the rueful, sometimes freakish vehemence of his heritage as an old-line, roving journalist; legatee of such as Ben Hecht, O. Henry, William Bradford Huie, as well as their godfather, autodidact entrepreneur Bernarr Macfadden, model for Doc Bingham in Dos Passos’ USA. Alike in their vagrant inventiveness and weasel-eyed scouting of the local American landscape, are the pulp writers of the thirties and forties: Lester Dent, Norvell Page, Maxwell Grant (pseudonym of Walter Gibson, originator of the magazine series The Shadow). One recalls the scattering of fiction Fuller produced in the forties and fifties, including one journalistic crime thriller: The Dark Page. Likewise, his screenplays for such journalistic whistleblowers as Scandal Sheet (1952) and Power of the Press ([1943] which includes the exposure of a murdering newspaper exec through a flagrantly zany piece of evidence-rigging that recalls the ripest of Jacobean theatre). The crudity and crassness of pulps and daily journalese, erupts often maddeningly in Fuller’s writing.

He was never a dab hand at eloquence, yet the expeditious bluntness of his lines sometimes achieves a pungent aptness (recall Underworld USA and Beatrice Kay’s bitter reproof of Cliff Robertson: ‘You coulda been a giant – but you’re a midget.’) I Shot Jesse James is devoid by and large of Fuller’s rhetorical excrescences; but replete with the wisdom ingested by him from his own perspective, not only on his journalese heritage, but his legacy of exposure to death and random violence. One vignette has Bob Ford explaining to the wagon show master the familial ties of various Western outlaws: Belle Starr, the Daltons. One feels that frontier history has passed into the hands of the receivers, the tent shows, the Hippodrome and the pulps whose descendents were to nurture Samuel Fuller. I Shot Jesse James is a minor classic, a tragedy of mean violence and incomprehension; and the latent, darkly absurd perils attending bogus heroism that is thrust upon one.

Voices of the Press
Samuel Fuller’s Park Row

Park Row (1952), Samuel Fuller’s fourth self directed, written (and independently produced) film, is probably his most verbal and voluminous. It is consecrated to the printed word, i.e., journalism, before the credits (preceded by the heraldic ‘A Samuel Fuller Production’). The viewer is confronted with a gliding screen–filling succession of newspapers, nation-wide, possibly world-wide. Over this Babel of titles is superimposed the block-lettered admonition that ‘One of these is the paper you read’. The film’s prospectus: an epic of early American journalism is proclaimed by the kind of hectoring, momentous voice commonly (in the past) associated with circus barkers and newsreel commentators. We are presented with the film’s producer on a printer’s block, clasped, as the receding camera discloses, in the hand of Gutenberg himself: his statue, in niche. Accompanied by our vocal cicerone, the camera then sidles over to a statue of Benjamin Franklin, ‘the patron saint of journalism’. The camera’s movement also allows us a glimpse of a nineteenth century New York street: 1883, June. The touch of raucous flash seems signature Fuller; the ceremonial progress, not at all. And yet …

The entire segment, actually, offers, like the illuminated capitals in medieval manuscripts, a compact digest of Sam Fuller’s filmmaking style. Brassy urgency, full-throated assertiveness; concise, yet tellingly detailed, locale; and more challenging to the viewer’s easy assumptions about Fuller: a regard for venerable images of a distinct kind.

Strange to note, one agrees, amid the work of so notable a counter-romantic and seeming iconoclast. Yet, we are reminded once more, Fuller’s passions and preoccupations – above all, his nuts and bolts pragmatism – overleap the stiles of programmed ideology. What have we in Park Row? Some time after the brief sculpture exhibit, the editorial office of Phineas Mitchell (Gene Evans) displays framed portrait photographs of renowned newspaper editors: Greeley, Pulitzer, Dana. Crowning the array of hallowed imagery, much of the film’s continuity devolves upon the haggling between the French and American governments about our acquisition of the Statue of Liberty. And, looking back to Fuller’s 1951 The Steel Helmet, one recalls the gigantic Buddha entrusted to the guardianship of Sgt Zack (Evans) and his raggle taggle GIs. Fuller’s bearing towards such ‘idols’ is akin to his regard for children, who figure repeatedly in his films, to greater or lesser degree. (At least once, the strains fuse: recall Underworld USA [1961], in which the apartment of an elderly ex-hooker [Beatrice Kay] displays children’s dolls; all testifying to her unfulfilled past.) Fuller offers images and kids as trustees, repositories of ancient values: honour, human fellowship – the holy spirit of worthy creation.

The latter value is on display indeed, on parade – throughout Park Row, in which there figure three interrelated assemblages: the construction of Liberty’s persona, Mitchell’s archetypal newspaper The New York Globe and the community of diverse talents and energies, housed in varyingly unlikely presences, marshalled by Chief Mitchell. As portrayed by a very lithe, moustached Evans (at radical odds with the blocky, fatigue-garbed Sgt Zack in the war films), Mitchell discharges his authority with mingled steadfastness and explosive impulsiveness.

Park Row is probably unique among Fuller’s films in the absorbing creative animus, the excitement of vital production, which animates it. The tiny office acquired by Mitchell teems with a jubilant brio that recalls the thirties and forties works of Capra and Sturges, its volcanic élan and beauty of didactic detail rivalling their newspaper sequences. The effluvium of burgeoning joy recalls an image once used by James Agee, of a flower blooming in stop-motion. The pulsation of multi-faceted talent, united in the birthing of a common vision, also reminds me of King Vidor’s Our Daily Bread (1934) in the exhilarating montage of the communal farm being erected. Fuller’s camera, however, eschews the elliptical shorthand of montage; rather, he adduces a cascade of language and visual detail, augmented by a bustling, prowling, sinuously gliding camera. Here, as in his other films, his paradoxically bold view, and ensuing style, feature what might best be called a swashbuckling empiricism, akin to that of Balzac (whom Fuller has saluted vocally) and Kipling.

As Jonathan Rosenbaum has noted to me in conversation, Park Row bears more than a casual resemblance to Fuller’s films of military warfare. The joyous esprit cited above is veined and riven with the incursions of a ferocious press war initiated when Mitchell takes furious leave of his employer, The New York Star, governed by the autocratic Charity Hackett (as stunningly acted by Fuller’s discovery Mary Welch). Possibly suggested by the Washington Times-Herald doyenne Cissy Patterson, Hackett combines goddess, queen and, when charm is called for, siren.

Despite her regal authority, Hackett, as presented by Fuller and Welch, is bespelled by the playground of power offered by her role as publisher/editor. Unlike the power esteemed, and sought, by Mitchell, she relishes the power of the press as manipulator i.e., of public passions. Indeed, the animus that propels Hackett is akin to that of the ‘crusading journalists’ lionised by so many Hollywood fables; many of which envision the editor as surrogate PI and sheriff’s deputy. The major iconoclasm of Park Row is its battering of the simplistic stereotypes that bypass the newspaper’s mission as a servant of many-aspected enlightenment. Mitchell’s collision with Hackett is sparked by his fury at the recent crusade of The Star: the railroading, as he sees it, of a convicted felon to the gallows. Setting the key for the film’s style and cumulative message, Mitchell protests the ramrodding cruelty with an act of symbolic desecration: the epitaph ‘Murdered by The Star’ affixed to the simple marker on the pauper’s grave. Presented with the abandoned office of a failed would be editor, Mitchell, like the unattended king in Jesus’ parable, rallies supporters from the hoi polloi fringe society. First among these is one Josiah Davenport (Herbert Heyes), a retired septuagenarian newspaperman, who promptly becomes Mitchell’s Lieutenant and Nestor to the fledgling paper. The growing entourage includes Steve Brodie, of the once famous swan dive from Brooklyn Bridge (he is played with frenetic charm by George O’Hanlon, Joe Doakes in 'So You Think ...', the popular comedy-short series of the ‘40s and ‘50s). One recalls the role as undertaken in Raoul Walsh’s The Bowery of 1933 by another George: Raft. Among the gathering crew is a diminutive Italian typesetter, Mr Angelo (Don Orlando), whose Van Dyke beard and small frame contribute a courtly, Old World panache; he is complemented by a recent German immigrant: Mergenthaler (Bela Kovacs) inventor of the Linotype who, like a cheerful genie, brings his magical dingus to fruition, and in two seconds flat, christens it. The modest, benign infiltration of the frontier press world with these aged and Old World envoys resounds a note memorable from sagacious, maternal or fatherly figures like J. Edward Bromberg in I Shot Jesse James (1949); Victor Francen, in Hell and High Water (1954), or, Thelma Ritter’s baglady in Pickup on South Street (1953) or Beatrice Kay in Underworld USA. Fuller’s deference to the authority of such ancestry marks another prism of a Fuller not accounted for by the too-popular critical cartoon of a fire-breathing troglodyte and vigilante. The seldom slackening torrent of imagery is parallelled by a cataract of journalistic lore and rhetoric of an unpolished bluntness that manages to suggest the stylistic periods of O. Henry of H. C. Bunner: ‘The Globe is a stallion bursting from its stall, bristling with news.’ Along with the ideals of a free press, its nuts and bolts lingo is unstintingly confided to us, in part via the instructions given an eager ten-year-old ‘printer’s devil’ (the lad who collects the printer’s litter); and the litter (‘hell box’). How often in Hollywood films (including some of the best) has one witnessed so lovingly methodical and ebullient testimony to the written and spoken word? As a coda, we are presented with an obituary written by the veteran Davenport for himself; he has disappeared during a raid on The Globe by Hackett’s minions. As read aloud by Mitchell, it combines the competences of Alden and Walt Whitman.

This is not to suggest any unvarying pastoral mood in Fuller’s fabricated epic. There is a succession of onslaughts by The Star’s mercenaries: climaxing in an eruption of mayhem that peaks with Mitchell beating his opponent’s head against the pedestal of Ben Franklin’s statue. The marriage of Noh and kabuki!

One person above the rest adds a dimension of magnitude. I refer to Mary Welch, a woman of breathtaking dramatic skill, beauty and manifest intelligence. Her strength of presence combined with her flair for vocal nuance reminds me of such fine and meagrely appreciated actresses as Agnes Moorehead (in, say, Citizen Kane [1941] and The Seventh Cross [1944] before her impalement on a hysteria shtick), Janette Nolan or Constance Ford. Welch’s removal by heart attack was a crime against civilisation. But, as Sam Fuller has reminded us again and again, Death is roughneck.