Samuel Fuller’s thrillers and war films are blunt, restless and attentive to people trying to get by. We value his precise staging and sympathy for difficult people, though the lecturing can wear us down.
Fi1m perspective
In Pickup on South Street (1953), Fuller holds our attention on faces as people work out how far to trust one another. Greed, attraction and the need to earn a living compete with the demands of a spy hunt. We rate him for giving those less respectable motives proper attention, and for making the resulting thriller so brisk and funny. The people remain interesting even when the espionage becomes ordinary.
His crime-reporting background shows in his taste for sensational stories. The Steel Helmet (1951) established a personal approach to combat, followed by studio work including Pickup on South Street at 20th Century-Fox. Independence in the late 1950s led to Shock Corridor (1963) and The Naked Kiss (1964). These are stories of a mental hospital and a former prostitute, with the same interest in people respectable society would rather not examine.
That interest is clearest for us in Thelma Ritter’s Moe Williams, the informant in Pickup on South Street. Fuller’s screenplay treats her work as a livelihood, and Ritter makes the need to keep earning feel pressing. We were moved by her tired persistence, because she makes getting by matter even amid the spy business. Fuller never asks us to overlook what she does for a living. His hard-boiled dialogue also leaves room for humour; there is pleasure in these people’s impatience with one another.
Joseph MacDonald’s close-ups give changes of expression time to register, while Nick DeMaggio’s editing keeps the pauses tense. Fuller stages violence clearly enough for its force to come through without confusion. Leigh Harline’s music is serviceable; the actors’ impatient exchanges do more to sustain the film. The broader weakness is the lecturing: Fuller can press a message until the drama feels strained, and the bluntness already shows in this otherwise sharp thriller.
After a largely inactive spell in the 1970s, The Big Red One (1980) returned him to combat drawn from his own experience. White Dog (1982) came before a later period working mainly in Europe. Start with Pickup on South Street, where he gives difficult people enough time to become worth caring about.
Biography
Samuel Fuller was an American film director, screenwriter and novelist. He began his career as a journalist, working as a copyboy from the age of 12 and later as a crime reporter for the New York Evening Graphic.
Fuller served in the US Army during the Second World War with the 1st Infantry Division. He made his directorial debut with I Shot Jesse James (1949) and went on to direct and often write low-budget films including The Steel Helmet (1951), Pickup on South Street (1953), Shock Corridor (1963), The Naked Kiss (1964), The Big Red One (1980) and White Dog (1982). He died in 1997.
