First comprehensive study of this American original
A cigar-chomping storyteller who signaled “Action!” by shooting a gun, Samuel Fuller has been lionized as one of the most distinctive writer/directors ever to emerge from Hollywood. In such films as The Steel Helmet, Pickup on South Street, Shock Corridor, and The Big Red One, Fuller gleefully challenged classical and generic norms—and often standards of good taste—in an effort to shock and arouse audiences. Tackling war, crime, race, and sexuality with a candor rare for any period, Fuller’s maverick vision was tested by Hollywood’s transition from the studio system to independent filmmaking. Now, in the first full account of all of the director’s audaciously original work, author Lisa Dombrowski brings his career into new relief. The Films of Samuel Fuller features close analysis of Fuller’s pictures and draws on previously untapped production and regulatory files, script notes, and interviews to explore how artistic, economic, and industrial factors impacted Fuller’s career choices and shaped the expression of his personal aesthetic. Fans of Fuller and American cinema will welcome this in-depth study of a provocative director who embodied both the unique opportunities and challenges of postwar filmmaking.
“This book explodes on the printed page with all the fury and ferocity of her subject’s most vivid explorations of the cinema of violence. Dombrowski has marvelously managed to make Samuel Fuller, the man, emerge more clearly from the mists of mythology he himself helped create. Splendid film scholarship!”—Andrew Sarris, film critic, The New York Observer
“In the strange universe of American cinema Sam Fuller is a certified bad-ass—stylistically visceral, thematically contentious, but always brutally honest. Lisa Dombrowski has written an invaluable and focused portrait of Fuller’s work, deftly placing it in the context of both a shifting studio system and the moral instability of the world at large.”—Jim Jarmusch, director, Stranger than Paradise, Broken Flowers
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LISA DOMBROWSKI is an associate professor of film studies at Wesleyan University.
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For more information on
Lisa Dombrowski and this book,
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