Park Row (Samuel Fuller, 1952)

Sam Fuller's Park Row is his most optimistic feature. Contrary to his cynical depiction of sleazy tabloid muckraking in such pictures as Shock Corridor, Park Row is an unabashed love letter to the newspaper. It opens with a scroll over the names of the 1,772 daily papers in circulation at the time (that number is now down below 1,422) and a title reading "All of them are the stars of this story." For good measure, Fuller dedicates the film to AMERICAN JOURNALISM in all caps. Even in his acknowledgments, the man hated subtlety.

Numerous films exalt the profession of journalism; it's a byproduct of so many classic screenwriters getting their starts in papers. Even Charles Foster Kane, megalomaniac and bender of truth, finished his exhausted friend's scathing review of his mistress' dismal opera performance for the sake of the story. But I can't think of any film that believes in and so powerfully adores the very idea of journalism as this. Though it climaxes in grandiose, almost comically violent fashion, Park Row's idealistic mood suggests that Fuller would arrive at the same celebratory conclusion if the most important story covered in the film were a dog show.

Fuller advertises his idealism from the first proper shot, pulling back from his production credit to show it in the bronze hand of a statue of Johannes Gutenberg erected in Park Row, the street near City Hall lined with newspaper publishers. Then, he goes for the blunt realism, moving immediately into the nearest bar to find the newsmen. Chief among these drinkers and thinkers is Phineas Mitchell (Gene Evans, who played the gruff sergeant in Fuller's The Steel Helmet), who stares disgustedly at the newspaper he works for, looking at an editorializing headline that triumphs in the execution of a criminal we learn faced trial primarily because of the Star's public smear campaign. When the publisher, a wealthy heiress ironically named Charity (Mary Welch), arrives, Mitchell drunkenly castigates her for this dishonesty, prompting her to casually fire him.

Phineas dreams of starting his own paper, and his prayers are answered with an eavesdropping benefactor offers to finance this new rag. It is telling that Fuller, who never met a moment he didn't oversell, plays the old man's idealistic speech about his love of journalism over complete silence. Fuller's unabashed enthusiasm for the artform—for that is how he presents the profession—is readily apparent without any swelling music, though that too comes later. Soon, Phineas' 1¢ daily paper is the toast of the town, as if the average citizen is drawn to the passion and verve that radiates from its ink, igniting a paper-war between Mitchell's globe and Miss Hackett's Star, a war that becomes absurdly literal.

Yes, as idealistic as Fuller is with this picture, he's still Fuller, and soon the picture turns violent as the director shows rapid escalation of physical and intellectual combat between the two papers. Using his aggressive but inventive direction to great effect, Fuller always finds a way to tie the pandemonium back into journalism: Phineas enacts revenge upon an attacker by beating him against a statue of Benjamin Franklin. Both sides fight over the first Linotype machine, the first great mechanical revolution in typesetting since Gutenberg's pres, as if it were a secret weapon to turn the tide of a war, the ability to go to print faster as vital as a new bomb or machine gun.

A war veteran and tabloid hack, Fuller always made his characters sound both like soldiers and copy writers, and those two threads never converged so openly in his other films. The rough-and-tumble, committed newsmen already have a determination to them, but when punches (and even bombs) get thrown, the broad characters almost resemble soldier stereotypes. There's the old codger looking for one last cause before hanging it up and the German inventor who almost seems a political prisoner, trapped between two powers that wish to exploit him. There's also the immigrant whose illiteracy and innocence belies the fact that he's the hardest worker of the bunch—Angelo is so good and fast at typesetting despite his illiteracy that Phineas warns him, "The day you learn to read, you're fired." Phineas corrals them all, his conviction only hardening with every broken truce and every betrayed feeling for the beautiful Charity, who allures him despite their conflict.

Crucially, Fuller juxtaposes Mitchell and Hackett as people both pursuing selfish, self-centered goals. Charity, who grew up in privilege, defends the power structure, goading the police into executing that troublemaker and railing about taxes in protest of the state raising money for the pedestal for the incoming Statue of Liberty. On the other hand, Phineas, the streetwise writer who's lived among the people, pursues a more populist approach, albeit one also designed to sell papers. He rallies around the Statue of Liberty as much for its commercial appeal as his ideological beliefs.

Nevertheless, that idealism ultimately defines the film even with its dip into guerrilla warfare. The conflation of the newspaper, the representation of Constitutional free speech and (of course) free press, with the symbolic importance of America—visualized by the Statue of Liberty—makes for a pulpy, in-your-face yet utterly romantic ode to journalism as the purest expression and defense of American ideals. Seen today, the love-hate relationship between Phineas and Charity subtly points toward the incestuous relationship between papers and a wry visualization of the pack journalism mentality. Yet the point Fuller clearly makes here is that, regardless of ideological slant and good ol' profit motive, journalists understand and respect each other, and their passion is infectious. Like America itself, Park Row is brutish, violent and self-mythologizing, but it is also representative of the uniquely loft heights of our national potential, a paean to a revolutionary set of beliefs as beautiful and inviting as they are contradictory. Fuller's films have always struck me as quintessentially American, and that's never more apparent than here.

The Naked Kiss

After working in the studio system throughout the 50s and scoring a few hits along the way, Samuel Fuller realized his interests and methods were becoming increasingly incompatible with the conservative, audience-wary executives and elected to align his independent style of filmmaking with an independent style of financing. Together with Shock Corridor, The Naked Kiss marked Fuller's move to small-scale studios and microscopic budgets. Fuller's films always looked as if he made them without much money, but he at least had a pick of some well-known stars and could make a color film or two. Now, he was back to black-and-white and unknowns.

Necessity, though, is the mother of invention, and the stylistic choices Fuller made to sidestep the budget shortcomings led to some of the most impressive direction of his career. A combination of Sirkian melodrama and lascivious noir, The Naked Kiss contains sequences wholly removed from the pulpy realism of the director's early work, even as it still bears his instantly identifiable stamp.

The Naked Kiss opens in a bewildering sequence that alternates POV close-ups with third-person medium shots in a frenzy. We don't even know who these characters are, what they do or why the woman is beating the man with her shoe. When the man grabs her hair and yanks, it all comes off, revealing her to be completely bald. Damn it, Sam, it was weird enough as it was. The woman beats the drunkard unconscious and takes out a wad of cash from his pocket, only keeping "the $75 I got comin' to me." She grabs her wig, straightens it out and the frame freezes to throw up the title. Who the hell couldn't love Sam Fuller?

When the action resumes, we follow the woman, Kelly (Constance Towers) to a small town called Grantville as she leaves the city looking to start over. The local sheriff, Griff, spots her and seems to know her true profession before she says a word, though she plays at being a traveling champagne saleswoman. Griff knows the deal: buy the champagne for $10, and for another $10 you can have the dame to go with it. He takes Kelly back to his place and enjoys her services, then informs her to take her business across state lines. "“If I let you set up shop in this neighborhood," he says, "the people would chop me like a ripe banana.” Griff recommends she get a gig at a bordello across the river disguised as a farcical candy shop. Why, he can even put the good word in, as he's a friend of the madam, Candy, and, it seems, a frequent guest.

Disgusted by the rank hypocrisy and looking for a change of pace anyway, Kelly decides to stay in town and get work as a nurse's aid at a children's hospital caring for handicapped kids. I suppose Fuller had to go out of his way to out-blunt the overused and unsubtle Madonna/whore dichotomy. As we learn late in the film, Kelly cannot have children of her own, and Fuller peppers the film with clear indications of her maternal desire, from the baby carriage visibly in the lower third of the screen as Griff pulls her aside in a park in their first meeting to the smiling faces of the crutch-ridden children who look to her for help and support. She proves a fine nurse, and the head of the ward, Mac (Patsy Kelly, who speaks as if, with every line, she considered using a Scottish accent but said "fuck it" halfway through) sings her praises to Griff, who can barely contain his fury. He accuses Kelly of using the hospital as a front, but she insists she's making a change.

Fuller's wit runs through the film: when Kelly finds a place to live, the landlady tours her through the room and proudly shows of the bed, which Kelly admires. "Do you realize we spend about a third of our lives in bed?" the old woman asks innocently, and the smile freezes on Kelly's face as a light sigh hisses out of her. The landlady also has a creepy, headless dresser's dummy upon which she has fastened a shrine to her late suitor Charlie, who died in WWII and never came home to marry her (the helmet on top of the mannequin has the insignia of the Big Red One on it, the division in which Fuller served). The woman kindly offers to take the thing out of the room, presumably to prevent horrible nightmares, but Kelly doesn't mind and jokes that she'll have someone to talk to. The landlady says that Charlie will always agree with her, with a chuckle that conveys a cracked madness.

Eventually, Kelly finds herself in the mansion of the man who gave the town its namesake, J.L. Grant (Michael Dante). When she arrives, he's returned from Europe and brings gifts for all his friends. Though he did not know of Kelly being invited, Grant has a spare for her, a trinket from Venice, which lights up her eyes. Grant looks like a vampiric Garry Shandling, and his spacious, ornate home feels drafty and frigid. He takes a shine to Kelly, his flattery conveying a predatory mood. "Intellect is seldom a feature of physical beauty," he says when Kelly mentions Byron, "and that makes you a remarkable woman."

Fuller moves between cynicism and unabashed sentimentality so rapidly that the two bleed into each other without clear separation. At the hospital, Kelly can be stern with the children to make them do their exercises, but we also get to see her ad-libbing a story about the children learning to walk again, leading to a dreamlike sequence showing the kids running outside without crutches or braces. Kelly's courtship with Grant is even more stylized: Grant shows Kelly silent video from Venice, and the sofa on which they sit slowly sinks into an abyss surrounded by infinite black as the setting switches back and forth from the Venice seen in the film reels and the sofa. To enhance the mood further, falling leaves drift into both places. These dips into full on cinematic expression show Fuller fully embracing his skills. He even inserts some self-reflexivity: playing at the theater when Kelly rides into town is Shock Corridor, and the book she reads is Fuller's own pulp novel The Black Page.

The more daring aesthetic informs the greater effrontery of the narrative. By this point, Fuller had put his deliberately unsubtle, aggressive writing to issues of American imperialism, racism, Communism and more. Here, he travels into the seedy underbelly of quaint small-town life, predating David Lynch by nearly two decades. Buff, another nurse in the children's ward and Griff's unofficial child after she lost her father in Korea, can no longer bear the sight of kids struggling and considers working as a Bonbon. Candy even gave her a loan as a sort-of default payment. Kelly literally slaps some sense into the girl, who defiantly says she can make major money at the shop. “You’ll hate yourself," Kelly intones, as much to the audience as Buff, "because you’ll become a social problem, a medical problem, a mental problem, and a despicable failure as a woman.” Afterward, Kelly takes the $25 Candy used to buy Buff and shoves it in the madam's mouth. It takes a prostitute to take down another, apparently, as Griff certainly isn't rallying troopers across state lines to bust the place.

And Griff's hypocrisy at the start is nothing compared to the truth behind Grant: Kelly returns to his mansion to show him the wedding dress she bought for their wedding, only to find him with a little girl. Fuller avoids displaying anything lascivious but makes the intent all too clear. Grant collapses at Kelly's feet, begging her to marry him. "You understand my sickness. You've been conditioned to people like me," he says with wild eyes. But not even the prostitute can stomach this, and Kelly grabs a phone receiver and strikes Grant dead. Instantly, the world collapses around her as Griff assembles old enemies from Kelly's dirty past and a vengeful Candy brings in all new foes to keep her in jail.

Though it does not attain the same fever pitch as Shock Corridor's maniacal build-up, the climax of The Naked Kiss brings out the fury of Fuller's aesthetic and writing. The man Kelly beat at the start returns and is revealed to be her pimp and the man who shaved her head, but Griff accepts his excuse that she stole from him. Candy breaks Buff into lying about Kelly's attempt to help her and finds a few more character assassins. Fuller clarifies an earlier moment of hesitation that crossed Kelly's face when Grant kissed her and also explains why he chose his title: Grant gave her "the naked kiss," the sort of liplock that communicates when a man is a pervert. She recognized it instantly but still allowed herself to hope, to aim for the idyllic lifestyle she sees around her despite the ironies piling up before the audience.

Even when Griff finally sees reason and finds the girl who can exonerate Kelly, Fuller does not relent. Griff, having bought Kelly's explanation when Buff later confesses in private, urges Kelly to coax an alibi from the scared girl, even to manipulate the child. At last exonerated, Kelly emerges to find a crowd assembled to praise her, but they look as if they'd gathered earlier that day as a lynch mob and only just learned the truth before Kelly came outside. They spin from outrage to adoration on a dime, and while Kelly desperately seeks their approval, she must also understand how meaningless that approval is.

It's a devastating indictment and goes some way toward explaining why the director, artistically liberated, all too soon found himself without work. After The Naked Kiss, Fuller would only make one theatrical film (Shark!, which he disowned) and spend the rest of his time in television until he rebounded with his most personal yet epic film, The Big Red One. The Naked Kiss may not be the strongest film in the director's canon, but no other movie so nakedly displays his contradictory, meaty, throat-grabbing style in such overwhelming force. No wonder the industry retreated from him after this.

Pickup on South Street

If Samuel Fuller can hang his legacy on anything, it is his ability to embody contradictions that no normal director could ever reconcile. He could be broader than James Cameron yet as sophisticated a writer as Wilder, a barbarian who seemed to steal a camera and trick a crew into making a movie even as his mise-en-scène communicated layers of meaning. Pickup on South Street, his 1953 noir masterpiece, contains the sort of anti-Communist sentiment you'd expect from a cheap genre film in the early '50s, yet its politics are so deliberately vague that producers could simply change some lines in dubbing to change the Communist MacGuffin to drugs in order to play the film in commie-loving France. No editing to the film itself was necessary.

The supposed anti-Communism streak can only be seen in a few lines of dialogue, perfunctory crowd-pleasing sentiment that wards off any criticism from the "patriots." Some of those lines even point out how uninformed the general public is about the Reds. "What do I know about the Commies?" asks a stool pigeon central to the story. "Nothin.' I know one thing: I just don't like 'em."

What Fuller does instead with his villains -- if one can even delineate any character in this film as even slightly heroic to offset the others -- is play upon something more primal. The Communists filled a role in the American consciousness normally occupied by the bogeyman in the closet. Like the killer in M, the handful of Soviet collaborators represent a dark force within everyone that transcends anything so petty and fleeting as national loyalty. After a certain point, the object they chase becomes irrelevant to the beast they cannot tame, and nobody tackles that sort of thing with the same flair as Fuller.

Opening in a subway car as packed passengers engage in the standard behavior of public transportation use: not looking overly hostile but generally avoiding eye contact and shrugging off physical proximity as everyone must get close but strive not to get too close. One man slinks up to a bombshell and picks her purse. Funnily enough, the eye contact he maintains with the woman to avoid suspicion attracts the audience's suspicion instantly given how deliberately everyone else on the train avoids any kind of contact. With a magnificent use of close-ups that Robert Bresson must have studied before making Pickpocket, Fuller creates suspense immediately. As far as we know, this criminal is just pinching a wallet. Who is this guy? Is the woman important? Why is that other man watching them intently, and what does he see?

Only after the pickpocket exits the train and the victim eventually gets off at her stop do the pieces start to fall into place. The woman, Candy (Jean Peters), realizes she's missing her billfold and jumps on the phone to call her lover, Joey, but their conversation, vague as it is, suggests she lost more than money. At last, things become clear: the second man in the train was a cop, but he was watching the woman, not the pickpocket. He knows she's carrying government secrets, even if she doesn't, and the theft sets off a race to find the crook, Skip McCoy (Richard Widmark) that pits Commies who don't display any outward dedication to the Red cause versus cops who don't show any serious commitment to America. Everyone involved is just doing what they're forced to do.

This existentialist streak complicates the narrative, turning what might have been an 80-minute piece of fluff into an exploration of feelings of isolation, unchangeable fate and the price of blind, automatic devotion to a cause. Everyone slaps around Candy, from her boyfriend to the cops to Skip himself when the two finally meet, but she takes all of it, and all the thinly veiled catcalls that she's a whore. Yet when she discovers she was carrying Red secrets, she collapses, terrified of being a Red. For audiences then, this might have been the perfect example of the evil of Communism, a black mark that superseded all other social taboos and transgressions. Today, we can see Fuller's intent more clearly: this woman is in her own personal hell, and the one thing that upsets her is an insinuation on something as indirect as a political affiliation?

Fuller further muddies the traditional arcs of Hollywood narratives by creating a disturbing relationship between Skip and Candy, one that comes off as aggressive, even rapacious, on Skip's part and wretchedly codependent on Candy's. Yet Fuller ironically scores their scenes with frothy, romantic violin swells, giving an audience the turgid romance they so love even as he rubs their faces in how dark those kinds of relationships really are.

And the dialogue, dear readers. Oh, it's so hard-boiled I wanted to tap my TV screen with a spoon and peel off the pixels. The FBI agent working with the police captain confronts Skip about the need for him to turn over the microfilm. Skip, of course, doesn't want to because he's already got three strikes and knows that turning over the film will earn him his fourth conviction, an automatic life sentence. "If you refuse to cooperate, you'll be as guilty as the traitors who gave Stalin the A-bomb," urges the agent. Skip, such an arrogant smart-ass you want to reach into the film and slap him, disinterestedly fires back, "You wavin' the flag at me?"

With such rotten characters, it's no wonder that even the film's moral center, the stool pigeon Moe (Thelma Ritter), is far from saintly. She first bursts in on Capt. Tiger and Agent Zara's investigation as if a kindly old lady coming in for a nice chat. When the fed leaves the room, she instantly starts singing to the captain, giving up the name of Skip, whom she's practically raised all his life and genuinely loves. She makes reference to feeding her kitty, by which she means a large wad of cash she's saved from her legitimate work selling neckties and the reward money she's collected over the years from ratting on crooks. Her nest egg takes a dark turn: rather than some fund to get her out of the projects, the cash is meant to get her a nice burial plot in a fancy graveyard and a lavish funeral. Fuller's camera moves in for one of its blisteringly effective close-ups when Tiger warns her that she shouldn't carry that wad around lest someone in her rough neighborhood steal it and she wind up in the rundown cemetery in Potter's Field. Ritter, a supremely talented comedic performer, turns so somber in an instant that you can't even laugh when she fearfully mumbles "Look, Tiger, if I was to be buried in Potter's Field, it would just about kill me."

The people of Pickup on South Street all use each other. The cops use Moe the way the Reds use Candy. Skip uses both women, the former for nurturing and support and the latter for sexual conquest. Even Moe and Candy exploit each other, Candy using Moe to get to Skip as Moe uses her to add more money to her burial fund. Loyalty is portrayed as a sucker's game in which a dominant force extracts from the weak until there's nothing left to give. But some of them do regret it and wish it were better: when Skip discerns Moe was the one who sold him out, he doesn't hold a grudge, saying she's gotta eat too. Fuller never dips into outright nihilism, but he makes sure that every potentially heartwarming aspect of the film is undercut with a horror that prevents easy escape.

It's not always easy to tell in a Fuller film whether the cast he assembled understood what it is he wanted, given how brazenly contradictory everything he ever wrote was. But he's got some magnificent performances here. Widmark was one of the great screen villains and antiheroes, able to mix his innocent looks -- he always looked like a teenager playing dress-up on a set -- with a sociopathic glare that sends chill after chill down the spine every time the camera captures the sinister twinkle in his eyes. Peters, on the other hand, will never make any short list of the greatest actresses, nor even a long list. But she absolutely and completely radiates pure sex in this movie, practically taped into each dress and breathily delivering each line. She's so electric that she seems a femme fatale even when she reveals herself almost instantly to be a victimized shrinking violet who allows herself to be pushed around by everyone.

But no one compares to Ritter, who commands every scene she's in and casts a pall over the final act when Joey comes 'round her apartment looking to take out his fear on a defenseless target. Ritter brings out the nuance Fuller couched in his broad, tabloid writing, first conveying the humor with her ironic self-justifications ("I was brought up to report any injustices to the authorities!") and gradually sinking lower and lower until you can see the world finally break her back. Her kind face belies the methods she's had to resort to in order to survive, and her ragged humanity only looks wholesome when compared to the absence of it in the other characters. In her final moment, a vast monologue that has her surrender to the forces she never even tried to fight in life, only to secure a noble death, she looks through the pathetic Joey, through the camera and through us. This isn't some lazy welfare queen rotting in the projects, this is a proud woman who could never win and finally stops trying even for second place. That Ritter received a nomination for Supporting Actress is no surprise; that she did not win, even over Donna Reed's fine work in From Here to Eternity, is a travesty.

Fuller is the king of small touches. Candy angrily throws down money in a Chinese restaurant to a guy who knows Moe's address as the man casually picks up the bills with his chopsticks and tucks them in his breast pocket. When cops come to Skip's hideout, he offers one a beer as he half-hurls the bottle in such a way that he clearly wants to strike the cop but leave himself an out to avoid an arrest. Skip cuts through Candy's paranoia over being affiliated with Communists through practicality: "So you're a Red, who cares? Your money's as good as anyone's." When Joey shoots Candy for not giving Skip up, the thief visits her in the hospital as the camera moves behind the bed, placing the two characters behind the bed frame's bars. These flourishes are but offshoots of a narrative so deceptively simple in conception and ultimately twisted in execution that I cannot hope to impart all Pickup on South Street has to offer, not for another several viewings yet.

Along with Nick Ray, Fuller was a master of digging through the artifice and false happiness of postwar cinema, tapping into the rich vein of cynicism that such a massive war created and no amount of economic prosperity could obliterate. Pickup on South Street, like the best noirs, is not merely stylized but reflective, tapping into the soul of an America that claimed it had entered a golden age yet had to immediately invent an enemy to fill the gap left by the Nazis just so people still had something to pin their fears upon. By casually stripping away Communism itself as something worthy of fear, Fuller backs up the general Red Scare assertion that we must fear enemies from without far less than those from within. The key difference is where the Red Scare engendered fear of neighbors, Fuller wants us to fear ourselves.