#sam fuller

From "A Fuller Life" (2013).

A documentary about Sam Fuller. Friends and (former) co-workers are reading his story.

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"i am your bodyguard which means i need a BODY to GUARD"

House of Bamboo premiered in New York City on 1 July 1955.

Sam Fuller reworked Harry Kleiner's script for The Street with No Name (1948), changing much of the plot, but especially the location. Set in Tokyo, House of Bamboo was the third major American studio film to be shot on-location in Japan, and the first in color.

[The following review contains MAJOR SPOILERS; YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!]

At first glance, The Crimson Kimono appears to be a rather vanilla example of film noir. The plot revolves around a murder investigation: after a popular burlesque dancer is shot dead in Los Angeles’ Little Tokyo district, a pair of hardboiled detectives must use their grit, wits, and fists to track down the perpetrator—so far, so formulaic. The narrative abruptly veers into unexpectedly melodramatic territory, however, when both gumshoes fall hopelessly in love with their star witness, straining the bonds of their partnership—and their friendship, which stretches back to the foxholes of the Korean War.

This dilemma hits Joe Kojaku—the Asian American half of the buddy-cop duo—particularly hard; perceiving his pal’s jealousy and resentment over the budding romance as evidence of repressed racism, he begins to question his entire identity. A man of Japanese parentage born and raised in California, he is the quintessential outsider, feeling as though he belongs to neither culture. James Shigeta’s layered, nuanced performance (combined with Samuel Fuller’s sensitive, insightful direction) enriches every frame; the scenes in which his psychologically tormented character aimlessly wanders the dark, empty, labyrinthine streets convey a palpable atmosphere of angst, insecurity, and loneliness.

The combination of two filmmakers as distinctive as Samuel Fuller and Douglas Sirk would have made for a much better film than SHOCKPROOF (1949, TCM, YouTube) had Columbia Pictures not softened most of the rough edges of Fuller’s script. He wrote about a parole officer (Cornel Wilde) who becomes obsessed with a murderess (Patricia Knight, aka Mrs. Wilde) under his supervision. He tries to keep her from the gambler boyfriend (John Baragrey) for whom she had killed, gets her a job caring for his blind mother (Esther Minciotti) and, when she shoots a man to protect him, goes on the lam with her., The film still has a strong sense of the forces that drive Wilde from the straight and narrow and a wonderful bit of irony at the end that I can’t reveal. But it also has a hokey ending forced on Sirk and Fuller by the studio. Sirk hated it so much he left Columbia and briefly returned to Germany.