Samuel Fuller | Pickup on South Street | The Crimson Kimono | Shock Corridor | Dead Pigeon on Beethoven Street | The Big Red One
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Is Samuel Fuller's Pickup on South Street (1954) a film noir? One might point out that it was made after the main heyday of noir, although major noir films were still being made. The film involves international Communism and espionage, and this is also very different from the crime backgrounds of most noirs. Fuller is staunchly anti-Communist, and this gives a moral dimension to the film that is absent from most noir. The characters, especially the women, struggle heroically to prevent weapons secrets from falling into the hands of the Communists. This sort of moral point is simply not in most noir film's world view. They tend to take place with purely criminal matters in a world without much transcendent moral purpose.
For another, none of the women in the film are femme fatales. The glamorous looking heroine turns out to be the main male character's redeemer, not his destroyer. No one seems emotionally obsessed, and no romantic passion leads to death.
If the term "film noir" simply refers to any black and white non-whodunit crime film made in Hollywood in the 1940's and 1950's, then Fuller's film is automatically a film noir. Otherwise, one might point out that Fuller's work does not fall into standard aspects of noir themes or style. His work seems very different from true film noir. Fuller rarely uses the extreme angle photography found in Fritz Lang or Robert Siodmak. Night scenes do not involve high contrast.
The title of this film echoes Raymond Chandler's prose mystery tale "Pickup on Noon Street" (1936). Later, Fuller will also create Dead Pigeon on Beethoven Street (1972), so he likes this form of title. Such street titles were also a feature of the semi-documentary film noir, such as Henry Hathaway's The House on 92nd Street (1945). That film, like Fuller's, deals with foreign spies trying to uncover important weapons secrets in New York City; in both, FBI agents try to counteract them.
This excellent film shows several of Fuller's strong points as a filmmaker:
These are recurrent elements in Fuller's best films.
It is also typical of Fuller's best work, in that he wrote the screenplay himself, and that that the film was self-initiated project. Such films tend to be more creative than the commissioned projects Fuller did for Fox, for example, which often have screenplays written by others.
Much of The Crimson Kimono involves three distinct kinds of shots: frontal spectacle shots, camera movement, and dialogue shots.
All three types of shots are often constructed frontally. This same frontal approach was sometimes used by Edward L. Cahn.
1) Spectacle shots include the targeting of the heroine at the sorority house near the start; and the shots of the paraders at the very end, after the killer has been captured. These are shots of purely visual interest, often of groups of people or objects without motion. They tend to be prettily composed. When Fuller wants to show a spectacle, he often shoots it from the front, with the spectacle parallel to the plane of the frame.
2) The camera movements are related in technique to the spectacle shots, although they are also far more complex. Camera movements often begin or end with such a frontal spectacle shot. Or have such a shot in the middle.
Camera movement tends to be complex. The shots are held for a fairly long time. They often involve the movements of characters: entering a room, crossing a street, chasing a crook. They are ingeniously put together. In fact, most of them can be considered as art objects, separate, jewel like shots designed to please with their imagination. Camera movement is not a continuous commentary on action throughout, as it is, say, in Max Ophuls' final films, or in Otto Preminger's Fallen Angel.
Some camera movements tend to start out frontally, then move straight backward, towards the viewer. This preserves the frontality of the shot. Examples: the mid section of the early "cross the street" shot. After the initial pan, the camera is parallel to both the street and the big building. Then the camera moves backward, keeping itself still parallel to the building and the street.
A shot at the police station follows one officer deeper and deeper into a room, where the heroine is studying mug shots. The shot keeps revealing more and more of the grid of pictures and posters on the wall behind. The many different views of this wall, all with more and more of its beautiful rectilinear grid in view, in one of the most beautiful in the film. It is like a Mondrian in motion.
The most amazing camera movement shot in the film is the doll show. The camera keeps moving backward, showing more and more of the doll show, as the actors move around in intricate patterns. This is a triumph of visual complexity. This is like the shot at the police station with the wall grid, but even more complex.
Fuller does sometimes use high level angles in his spectacle shots or camera movements. This especially true in the shot of the street leading to the temple, and in the doll show. These have the effect of suggesting a map of the street, and a floor plan diagram of the doll show. Even here, this high level angle creates a harmonious sort of visual beauty, combined with a clear, logical overview of the area. There is no attempt to make a baroque, or disorienting view, as in so much extreme-angle photography in noir.
Other camera movements are at eye level. Fuller is very happy to shoot them this way. The movement of the camera is key here, not some extreme angle.
When Corbett and Fuller encounter a staircase, Fuller does not shoot up it at baroque angles, as nearly all noir directors would do. Instead, his camera gracefully follows Corbett up the stairs, in a beautiful and exciting rising camera movement. Once again, the camera movement is a gorgeous and imaginative spectacle. It is not a trigger for noir tilted-angled, architecturally-centered compositions.
None of the camera movements in The Crimson Kimono are as long or elaborate as the ten minute take in Forty Guns. But they share a similar aesthetic, emphasizing spectacle, ingenuity of staging, and a graceful visual moving camera visual style. These are distinct set pieces, viewed in some ways by Fuller as independent art objects within the over all matrix of the film.
3) Dialogue shots tend to be frontal as well. They tend to be very plain, visually. Fuller will arrange his actors in a plane, set the camera up directly in front of them, and shoot their dialogue. He usually does not try to create some brilliant composition. Or make any special emphasis on architecture. Characters in Fritz Lang are often deeply embedded in a composition deriving from the architecture. Much of film noir has followed this Lang tradition: Anthony Mann, Robert Siodmak, Robert Aldrich, Orson Welles, Joseph Losey, for example. Fuller's complete avoidance of this tradition is one reason that The Crimson Kimono looks so much unlike mainstream film noir.
Fuller does not tilt his camera very much in dialogue shots. This is also different from much of film noir.
Some of the compositions in the film involve S-shapes. A shot, showing City Hall reflected in a store window in Little Tokyo, has S-shaped regions surrounding the plate glass with the reflection. This shot is one of Fuller's cleverest compositions linking City Hall and the Japanese district in Los Angeles.
Much of the camera movement at the doll show (the highlight of the film) can be described as S-shapes. The camera keeps framing the corridors at the show, together with "empty" wall space framing the characters, as S-forms. These S-shaped regions are the spaces occupied by the characters, while the tables with dolls around them block out the regions outside the S. Fuller shows great ingenuity, in constantly discovering or creating new S-shaped regions, as he moves his camera around at the show.
Shock Corridor (1963) has a number of links with Fuller's first feature, I Shot Jesse James. Both films:
For another, they remove any sense of guilt from the protagonist. Unlike Bob Ford in I Shot Jesse James, the reporter in Shock Corridor has done nothing wrong.
The location filming here also recalls Godard, and the French New Wave. Most of Fuller's Hollywood films had been shot on studio sets. Here Fuller has taken to the streets. This was a general change in filmmaking practice in the 1970's, not just restricted to Fuller. But still, Fuller's use of location seems especially Godardian. Fuller, like Godard, often follows his characters along urban streets. There is a documentary like quality to these scenes, in both Godard and Fuller. Just as Godard's Breathless (1959) showed the streets of Paris, and Le Petit Soldat (1960) Geneva, so does Fuller's film display Köln. The many cafe sequences in Godard are echoed by the restaurant scenes in Fuller. Even Godard's interiors, which emphasize props against white walls, find an echo in the early hotel scene in this film. Godard's use of hanging painting masterpieces on the walls as cultural references is also employed by Fuller here. It is a whole Godard movie Fuller is making here, employing every Godard technique he can lay his hands on. Fuller had always loved to play with the grammar of film. Here he has a whole new set of toys to play with.
A shot out of a huge hospital window recalls the similar large apartment windows in Antonioni's L'Eclisse (1961).
The scenes with the babies in the hospital recall the children's ward in The Naked Kiss (1964). Fuller also juxtaposed the innocence of children and the corruption of adults in Underworld U.S.A. (1961).
Fuller had always enjoyed including religious symbols and architecture in his films. One thinks of the monastery in The Baron of Arizona (1950), the crucifix in The Big Red One, and the Buddhist temples and statues in The Steel Helmet (1951) and The Crimson Kimono. Here Köln Cathedral plays a prominent role.
The Big Red One (1980) has recently been reconstructed, with much of the footage cut (against Fuller's wishes) in its first release restored. By any standard, this is a considerable improvement.
However, I am baffled both by this film, and its enthusiastic critical response. Much of the movie is just combat scenes, relentless looks at the main characters firing at the Germans, and the Germans firing back at them. I could rarely see anything interesting or significant about this depressing footage. There is no educational value to the film, few of the documentary-like scenes that have been of such substance in previous Fuller works. There is little plot - just a string of incidents - and we learn almost nothing about the characters or inner lives the five main soldiers followed throughout the film. And the film's visual style rarely seems distinguished. Consequently, Fuller is playing against the strengths that distinguish his best work as a filmmaker.
The films does have some above-average scenes. The early scene of the Americans and the French trying to be allies, despite a vicious pro-Nazi Vichy general, is impressive. This has both the off-trail drama and historical insight that recall Fuller at his best. Such peace time interludes as the welcome from the Sicilian women, and the birth of a baby, are also nicely done. A brief scene with Christa Lang as an opportunistic, corrupt German aristocrat has both the historical background and characterization that is so sorely lacking in much of the rest of the film. A battle in an insane asylum is at least off-trail, reminding us that Fuller made Shock Corridor, and also featuring an all-too-brief good performance by Stéphane Audran, representing the New Wave (she is the talented star and wife of Claude Chabrol). Fuller also evokes some of the fanatic support Hitler had from many Germans, including a truly sinister pro-Hitler protest, a scene I have never seen in any other film.
In general, I really dislike war movies. I regard having to see combat on screen at a thoroughly unpleasant experience. Fuller deserves credit for not making the combat in this film seem like "fun", or some sort of cheap video game: it is harrowing and nightmarish. This film seems morally and politically inoffensive. It does not glorify war, or serves as a recruiting poster. But it is not especially creative or interesting either, a few good scenes aside.