Samuel Fuller

"Van Gogh was a great inspiration for me, a guy for whom life was work and work was life. I wanted to be like him, except I didn't want to go nuts and cut off my ear." — Samuel Fuller It seems only appropriate that the Los Angeles County Museum of Art's "Fuller at Fox" film series opens Friday with the most accomplished work Samuel Fuller made for the studio, 1953's "Pickup on South Street." Richard Widmark plays a pickpocket who makes a big mistake when he accidentally steals a roll of microfilm that the communists want.

"Van Gogh was a great inspiration for me, a guy for whom life was work and work was life. I wanted to be like him, except I didn't want to go nuts and cut off my ear." — Samuel Fuller It seems only appropriate that the Los Angeles County Museum of Art's "Fuller at Fox" film series opens Friday with the most accomplished work Samuel Fuller made for the studio, 1953's "Pickup on South Street." Richard Widmark plays a pickpocket who makes a big mistake when he accidentally steals a roll of microfilm that the communists want.

Director Samuel Fuller, whose films reflected his experience as a Depression-era drifter, a World War II hero and a crime reporter, died Thursday. He was 86. Fuller died of natural causes at his home in the Hollywood Hills, said family friend Joseph McBride. Fuller, who lived in France until recently, had suffered a stroke several years ago. He became a copy boy for the New York Journal when he was 12 and a crime reporter for the San Diego Sun by the time he was 17.

AD edited Warning Shadows Home Alone With Classic Cinema Gary Giddins W.W. Norton: 416 pp., $18.95 Gary Giddins is well known for his writing about music — he was a Village Voice jazz columnist for three decades, and his books, among them the biography "Bing Crosby: A Pocketful of Dreams," are revered. His writing about movies gets less attention only because he does less of it. "Warning Shadows: Home Alone With Classic Cinema" is his first book devoted exclusively to movies, and it makes me wish that the New York Sun — the short-lived (2002-08)

Now that the Persian Gulf War has ended and we're deprived of our daily dose of military briefings from Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf and Lt. Gen. Thomas W. Kelly, the perfect substitute is Samuel Fuller's Korean War film, "The Steel Helmet." Gene Evans, who also starred in Fuller's "Park Row" and "Fixed Bayonets," is Sgt. Zack, the lone survivor of his unit who is befriended by a young South Korean boy and then meets up with a black medic (James Edwards). This multiracial, U.N.

The film is like a battlefield. Love, hate, action, violence, death . . . in one word, emotion. --Samuel Fuller * Nothing changes faster in the film world than directorial fashion. In hardly any time, today's young firebrand becomes yesterday's phlegmatic hack. But over the last 30 years, one taste has remained constant: Several generations of maverick filmmakers have felt compelled to pay homage to Samuel Fuller by putting him in one of their movies.

A cigar-chomping newspaperman turned two-fisted pulp auteur, Samuel Fuller (1912-1997) never had much use for subtlety. His signature style -- lurid, didactic, in-your-face -- would seem to leave little room for ambiguity. But because Fuller's films were often more complex than his tabloid sensibility suggested, he spent a good deal of his career being misunderstood and battling controversy.

Samuel Fuller, who liked to direct with a cigar in one hand and sometimes a .45 in the other, received the accolades at a near-three-hour memorial tribute Saturday morning at the Directors Guild that had largely eluded him during his many years in Hollywood.

"The Typewriter, the Rifle and the Movie Camera," Adam Simon's affectionate and illuminating portrait of feisty maverick filmmaker Samuel Fuller, airs tonight at 5 and 8 on the Independent Film Channel as an introduction to a series of eight Fuller films. When the 55-minute documentary's executive producer, Tim Robbins, remarks that Fuller made 23 films of "uncompromising power and integrity" between 1948 and 1989, he's on target.

Samuel Fuller was a director with a signature style: blunt verging on brutal, partial to shock cuts and mega close-ups. As a screenwriter, this former crime reporter was no less distinctive, favoring hot-button issues and hard-boiled repartee. A superb new seven-disc set, "The Samuel Fuller Collection" ($79.95, Sony, out Tuesday), which contains two films written and directed by Fuller and five earlier efforts on which he has a writing or story credit, is an intriguing auteurist study that shows the Fuller personality both as the driving force of a film and as an (often powerful)

A cigar-chomping newspaperman turned two-fisted pulp auteur, Samuel Fuller (1912-1997) never had much use for subtlety. His signature style -- lurid, didactic, in-your-face -- would seem to leave little room for ambiguity. But because Fuller's films were often more complex than his tabloid sensibility suggested, he spent a good deal of his career being misunderstood and battling controversy.

Sam Fuller's gloriously robust memoir is the inspirational book of the year, if not decade, for anyone even remotely connected to the film business.

Samuel Fuller, who liked to direct with a cigar in one hand and sometimes a .45 in the other, received the accolades at a near-three-hour memorial tribute Saturday morning at the Directors Guild that had largely eluded him during his many years in Hollywood.

Director Samuel Fuller, whose films reflected his experience as a Depression-era drifter, a World War II hero and a crime reporter, died Thursday. He was 86. Fuller died of natural causes at his home in the Hollywood Hills, said family friend Joseph McBride. Fuller, who lived in France until recently, had suffered a stroke several years ago. He became a copy boy for the New York Journal when he was 12 and a crime reporter for the San Diego Sun by the time he was 17.

If the recent death of James Stewart struck a deep and wide chord in the American public, it's due in part to two films he made with director Frank Capra, "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington" (1939) and "It's a Wonderful Life" (1946). Stewart made a number of classic films, but in the end he was most cherished as the naive neophyte who took on a corrupt U.S.

AD edited Warning Shadows Home Alone With Classic Cinema Gary Giddins W.W. Norton: 416 pp., $18.95 Gary Giddins is well known for his writing about music — he was a Village Voice jazz columnist for three decades, and his books, among them the biography "Bing Crosby: A Pocketful of Dreams," are revered. His writing about movies gets less attention only because he does less of it. "Warning Shadows: Home Alone With Classic Cinema" is his first book devoted exclusively to movies, and it makes me wish that the New York Sun — the short-lived (2002-08)

Samuel Fuller was a director with a signature style: blunt verging on brutal, partial to shock cuts and mega close-ups. As a screenwriter, this former crime reporter was no less distinctive, favoring hot-button issues and hard-boiled repartee. A superb new seven-disc set, "The Samuel Fuller Collection" ($79.95, Sony, out Tuesday), which contains two films written and directed by Fuller and five earlier efforts on which he has a writing or story credit, is an intriguing auteurist study that shows the Fuller personality both as the driving force of a film and as an (often powerful)

"The Typewriter, the Rifle and the Movie Camera," Adam Simon's affectionate and illuminating portrait of feisty maverick filmmaker Samuel Fuller, airs tonight at 5 and 8 on the Independent Film Channel as an introduction to a series of eight Fuller films. When the 55-minute documentary's executive producer, Tim Robbins, remarks that Fuller made 23 films of "uncompromising power and integrity" between 1948 and 1989, he's on target.

The film is like a battlefield. Love, hate, action, violence, death . . . in one word, emotion. --Samuel Fuller * Nothing changes faster in the film world than directorial fashion. In hardly any time, today's young firebrand becomes yesterday's phlegmatic hack. But over the last 30 years, one taste has remained constant: Several generations of maverick filmmakers have felt compelled to pay homage to Samuel Fuller by putting him in one of their movies.