Get your fill of Fuller
The Steel Helmet
The Melbourne Cinémathèque pays tribute to a film original.
"Film is like a battleground. There's love, hate, action, violence, death. In one word: emotion." When filmmaker Samuel Fuller uttered these words in Jean-Luc Godard's Pierrot le Fou, he (perhaps unknowingly) summarised his extensive film oeuvre spanning fifty years. From his first directorial effort I Shot Jesse James (1949) to his last film Street of No Return (1989), Fuller's work was marked by low budgets, pulp dialogue and a 'tabloid' style of filmmaking that stemmed from his first job as a newspaper copyboy and crime reporter.
In their boutique season Run for Cover: Samuel Fuller, Tabloid Poet, the Melbourne Cinémathèque surveys Fuller's varied career, beginning with a triple bill that includes one of his most controversial and rarely seen works. In White Dog (1982), Kristy McNichol plays a Hollywood starlet who adopts a stray dog only to discover that it has been trained to attack black people. Amidst rumours and negative press claiming the film was racist, Paramount Pictures suppressed its theatrical release in the US and in fact, the film was only officially released in the US last year on DVD. Critics, however, praised the film; Dave Kehr in the Chicago Tribune applauded Fuller for "pulling no punches" in the way he presented racism as "a mental disease, for which there may or may not be a cure," while The New York Times' Charles Taylor described it as "a profoundly antiracist film, though a despairing one."
Other season highlights include The Steel Helmet (1951), Fuller's masterpiece about the Korean War (and the first American film to deal with the subject), Shock Corridor (1963), a raw mix of comedy, melodrama and social commentary, and Underworld U.S.A. (1961), a brutal take on the revenge thriller and arguably Fuller's most visually impressive work.
Run for Cover: Samuel Fuller, Tabloid Poet screens from Wed 23 Sep to Wed 7 Oct. For session times and bookings click here.
Published Wednesday, 23 September 2009
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