A Fuller Life

Aside from a brief intro­duc­tion by direc­tor Saman­tha Fuller, every word spo­ken in A Fuller Life was writ­ten by its sub­ject, her father Sam Fuller, the mav­er­ick direc­tor of such pulp clas­sics as Pick­up on South Street and Shock Corridor.

Saman­tha divides the film into 12 sec­tions, each direct­ly inspired by chap­ters of her father’s 2002 auto­bi­og­ra­phy, ​‘A Third Face’, each read by one of his ardent admir­ers. Samantha’s con­ceit is a bold one, and it comes with inher­ent lim­i­ta­tions, a lack of crit­i­cal per­spec­tive and the con­stant threat of hagiog­ra­phy among them. But it works beau­ti­ful­ly as a glance into Sam Fuller’s cre­ative imper­a­tives and excit­ing life. One could argue that it for­feits Samantha’s own autho­r­i­al voice, but trans­form­ing a near­ly 600-page mem­oir into an 80-minute film is no easy task, and it is to her cred­it that non-stop read­ing is engag­ing and deter­mined. Dozens of chap­ters are excised to fit the brisk run­time, allow­ing a new sto­ry about the man­i­fes­ta­tion of auto­bi­og­ra­phy with­in the director’s work to emerge.

But a dra­mat­ic read­ing of select excerpts from ​‘A Third Face’ is not com­pelling in and of itself. Saman­tha ties togeth­er her father’s pre-Hol­ly­wood jobs, his time at war (which includ­ed storm­ing Nor­mandy), and his post-war auto­bi­og­ra­phy through the strate­gic inser­tion of film clips that exem­pli­fy par­tic­u­lar bio­graph­i­cal details. Ear­ly on, we see Fuller’s jour­nal­is­tic ambi­tions rema­te­ri­alise in John­ny Barrett’s hopes for a Pulitzer Prize in Shock Cor­ri­dor; lat­er, war sto­ries resur­face in films as far apart as The Steel Hel­met and The Big Red One, named for the divi­sion in which Fuller served. Fuller’s reg­i­ment, he tells us via Per­ry Lang, had peo­ple of every eth­nic back­ground: Irish, Jew­ish, Ital­ian, Lati­no, Armen­ian… every­thing except African. At that time, black peo­ple got sent to their own reg­i­ment, no doubt an obser­va­tion that fuelled Fuller’s race-con­scious filmmaking.

The cho­sen read­ers per­form won­der­ful­ly. A new voice tak­ing over every few min­utes could eas­i­ly become dis­tract­ing, but nar­ra­tors quick­ly slip into an appro­pri­ate, seem­ing­ly con­tin­u­ous char­ac­ter, and the film moves along with­out a hitch. James Fran­co recites Fuller’s child­hood mem­o­ries with star­ry-eyed won­der; Bill Duke gives intense dra­mat­ic weight to his obser­va­tions of race and racism as a jour­nal­ist in the 1930s; Con­stance Tow­ers is a per­fect match for Fuller’s post­war opti­mism, intel­lec­tu­al curios­i­ty and cre­ativ­i­ty. At one point, we learn, that Fuller had one hun­dred titles reg­is­tered with the WGA.

Such a detail is bare­ly sur­pris­ing; watch­ing A Fuller Life, it is easy to get wrapped up in Sam Fuller’s sto­ry­telling abil­i­ty. His mix­ture of hard­boiled descrip­tions and poet­ic rumi­na­tions make his encoun­ters with Mar­lene Diet­rich and a run-in with an anti- Mus­soli­ni Ital­ian woman par­tic­u­lar­ly res­o­nant. But the film suc­ceeds on col­lab­o­ra­tive terms, on the strength of its speak­ers and Saman­tha Fuller’s cura­to­r­i­al instincts in addi­tion to Sam Fuller’s words. A Fuller Life may not break new ground for­mal­ly, but smart, asso­cia­tive edit­ing and a keen focus make it a delight for long­time Fuller fans and new­com­ers alike.