The Baron of Arizona (Samuel Fuller, 1950)

Vincent Price and Ellen Drew in The Baron of Arizona

Cast: Vincent Price, Ellen Drew, Vladimir Sokoloff, Beulah Bondi, Reed Hadley, Robert Barrat, Robin Short, Tina Pine, Karen Kester, Margia Dean, Jonathan Hale, Edward Keane, Barbara Woddell. Screenplay: Samuel Fuller, Homer Croy. Cinematography: James Wong Howe. Production design: Jack Poplin. Film editing: Arthur Hilton. Music: Paul Dunlap.

"An occasionally true story" goes the tag line to Tony McNamara's delicious The Great, a miniseries about Catherine the Great. It's certainly a phrase that applies to almost every biopic ever made, but especially to Samuel Fuller's The Baron of Arizona, the second of his feature films as director, sandwiched between two better-known movies, I Shot Jesse James (1949) and The Steel Helmet (1951). The film purports to tell the story of James Addison Reavis, a fraudster par excellence who tried in 1880 to lay claim to virtually the entire United States territory of Arizona. The real story of Reavis's scheme is far more complex and far less romantic than the one Fuller carved out of it. Fuller's version is full of shady doings in a monastery, a hair-breadth escape abetted by Spanish gypsies, high-rolling arrogance, near death by lynch mob, and sentimental true love, everything that could allow Vincent Price to play both dashing and disreputable. You can probably sense Fuller feeling his way as a director in the movie -- it's not quite as solidly grounded as either of the ones that flank it in his filmography -- and its budgetary shortcomings are evident. But few directors could do as much with so little.

The Naked Kiss (Samuel Fuller, 1964)

The Naked Kiss (Samuel Fuller, 1964)

Cast: Constance Towers, Anthony Eisley, Michael Dante, Betty Bronson, Patsy Kelly, Karen Conrad, Marie Devereux, Virginia Grey, Linda Francis, Bill Sampson, Edy Williams. Screenplay: Samuel Fuller. Cinematography: Stanley Cortez. Art direction: Eugène Lourié. Film editing: Jerome Thoms. Music: Paul Dunlap.

The Naked Kiss begins with a bang: a woman beating the crap out of a man, using her shoe and everything else that comes to hand, even spritzing him with seltzer from a siphon before she finally knocks him cold, collects the $75 he owes her, replaces the wig that has fallen off her bald head during the fight, and departs. It's going to be hard to top that, you might think, unless you know Samuel Fuller's movies and can be sure that he will. We learn that she's called Kelly, that she's a prostitute, and the man she's beating up is her pimp, who shaved her head as a punishment. Some time later, long enough for her hair to have grown back fully, we catch up with her arriving in the town of Grantville, posing as a traveling saleswoman with a sample kit of a Champagne called Angel Foam. And it's there that she will try, after one last trick with the good-looking town police captain named Griff, to go straight. She gets a job in the local hospital for children with disabilities, thrives, and gets engaged to the town's most prominent citizen, a man named Grant. Of course, when we first encounter Grant, who is handsome in a particularly oily way, we know that things won't go right -- even after Kelly confesses about her past to him and he accepts her anyway. This is melodrama at its pulpiest, and Fuller makes the most of it in his own special way. There is nothing "realistic" about The Naked Kiss. You might even call it "para-realistic" -- existing somewhere alongside reality in the way lurid fictions do. Fuller's films, made without benefit of the budgets and technical resources of the big studios, look like the work of someone playing with the available money and resources to express a private vision that's slightly askew, like memories or even dreams of big studio movies. They're filled with unexpected details, such as Kelly's wig or the dressmaker's dummy that Kelly's landlady costumes in the uniform of her late fiancé, killed in the war. They make us laugh as much as they creep us out. There's even a slightly hallucinatory quality to the disabled kids Kelly works with, who are called on for a performance of a song known as "Little Child," which takes on a sinister irony when we discover that Grant, for whom Kelly stages the performance, is a pedophile. Sometimes I'm not even certain if I watched The Naked Kiss or if I dreamed it.

Park Row (Samuel Fuller, 1952)

Gene Evans in Park Row

Cast: Gene Evans, Mary Welch, Bela Kovacs, Herbert Heyes, Tina Pine, George O'Hanlon, J.M. Kerrigan, Forrest Taylor. Screenplay: Samuel Fuller. Cinematography: John L. Russell. Production design: Theobold Holsopple. Film editing: Philip Cahn. Music: Paul Dunlap.

Samuel Fuller's favorite film came out of his own experiences as a newspaper reporter in New York City, though Park Row is set in the 1880s, a bit before Fuller's journalism career. It's a thoroughly entertaining melodrama about a man with ink in his blood, Phineas Mitchell (Gene Evans), who starts his own newspaper, The Globe, with a bunch of cronies after they're fired from another paper, The Star, after criticizing its timid approach to the news and fawning attitude toward the powerful. Scrappy underdog takes on the big guys, as you've guessed. One of the big guys is actually a woman, Charity Hackett (Mary Welch), the publisher of The Star. In the midst of their newspaper war, Phineas and Charity manage to fall a bit in love, but he puts business before romance and refuses her offer to merge the two papers. A little heavy on the clichés, but full of energy.

The Steel Helmet (Samuel Fuller, 1951)

Richard Loo, Richard Monahan, and James Edwards in The Steel Helmet

Sgt. Zack: Gene Evans
Pvt. Bronte: Robert Hutton
Lt. Driscoll: Steve Brodie
Cpl. Thompson: James Edwards
Sgt. Tanaka: Richard Loo
Joe: Sid Melton
Pvt. Baldy: Richard Monahan
Short Round: William Chun
The Red: Harold Fung

Director: Samuel Fuller
Screenplay: Samuel Fuller
Cinematography: Ernest Miller
Art direction: Theobold Holsopple
Film editing: Philip Cahn
Music: Paul Dunlap

We tend to think of the American civil rights movement as beginning on May 17, 1954, when the United States Supreme Court handed down the Brown v. Board of Education decision, declaring segregated schools illegal. But it's worth giving credit for the climate change that led to the decision to many precursors, including, of all things, the Hollywood film industry. Timid and tepid as "race-conscious" films like Pinky (Elia Kazan, 1949) and No Way Out (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1950) seem to us today, they were made by major directors, and showed a willingness to confront American racial conflict that would have been unwelcome a decade earlier. But maybe no movie suggests how profound that change in attitudes would become than Samuel Fuller's The Steel Helmet, an unabashedly low-budget movie, shot in ten days, by a director regarded as second-string and a producer, Robert L. Lippert, known as "The Quickie King." It's a war movie with all the clichés of the genre, including the old familiar melting-pot cast of soldiers, except that in the war movies of the 1940s, made as morale boosters, the ingredients in the melting pot were mostly of European origins: Irishmen, Italians, Swedes, and so on, and a mix of Catholics, Protestants, and Jews. But Fuller's Korean War-era melting pot added an African-American medic and a Japanese-American sergeant to the mix. And it directly confronted the issue of racial discrimination when a North Korean POW taunts both men about their lives back home. Granted, the response of the medic, Cpl. Thompson, is a little disappointing, essentially a these-things-take-time shrug, but the fact that a black actor, James Edwards, has been included in the cast, and on a more-or-less equal footing -- he sasses back when sassed -- is extraordinary. And the POW's mention of the American internment camps for Japanese-Americans is one of the first references in a movie to what was then still a little-known blot on American justice. Because Fuller is just so damn good at telling a story and keeping the action hot, all of this goes by without feeling like a blatant attempt to stir the liberal conscience. If his characters are stereotypical -- Sgt. Zack isn't much more than the hard-bitten, cigar-chomping old hand, and Lt. Driscoll is the greenhorn officer a bit out of his depth -- Fuller still knows how to put them into play. He works miracles with locations that are clearly not Korean or even Asian -- they were shot in Griffith Park in L.A. -- and with studio sets -- a door in the Buddhist temple slams and the wall visibly shakes. It's doubtful that The Steel Helmet converted any racists in the audience, but the fact that it must have got them into the theater at all -- it grossed more than $6 million on a budget of a little over $100 thousand -- is a tribute to Fuller.