order to ensure a life for her child in America. Fuller exploits her mixed ancestry and love affair with a Communist leader for extended discussions of race and politics, making China Gate the most didactic of his combat pictures. Based on real events and shot on location with relatively large casts and crews, Merrill’s Marauders and The Big Red One expand the scope of Fuller’s combat sequences at the same time as they focus more narrowly on a single topic: staying alive. Stripped of any significant female presence or discussions of why we fight, their narratives abandon the romantic plotline and didacticism of China Gate to craft repetitious scenes emphasizing the unmerciful nature of war and the simple triumph of survival; in doing so, they offer perhaps the most distilled representation of Fuller’s worldview. In its redirection of genre conventions, alteration of suspense and surprise, emphasis on paradoxical situations, and attempt to suggest the anxieties experienced by soldiers in war, The Steel Helmet anticipates aspects of each of Fuller’s later combat pictures.
The topicality of The Steel Helmet, widespread critical praise, and its distinctly different distribution strategy helped it to attain greater financial success than Fuller’s first two Lippert pictures. With its lack of stars and minimal production design, The Steel Helmet relied on the timeliness of its subject matter to sell the film. Newspaper advertisements exclaimed, “It’s the real Korean story!” next to an image of Sergeant Zack’s eyes peering out from below his bullet-ridden helmet. Variety predicted “a sure money film,” and Boxoffice pegged it as a potentially lucrative programmer, noting the flexibility of the film’s eighty-four-minute running time to play either side of a double bill.33
The Steel Helmet debuted in Los Angeles with a two-week run in mid-January 1951, topping a double bill with the Lippert western Three Desperate Men (1951) at the 2,100-seat United Artists theater downtown and at four smaller first run houses.34 Strong returns, including the best trade in two years at the UA, generated momentum for the film’s booking at the end of the month in New York City’s Loew’s State, a 3,450-seat theater that had never previously played a Lippert film. At the State, The Steel Helmet scored a “smash” $26,000 in its first frame, the theater’s best in many weeks, and was held over for ten additional days. When the film opened in first-run theaters in five major markets at the beginning of February, it emerged as the seventh highest grosser for the week. Despite controversy surrounding the film’s depiction of Sergeant Zack shooting an unarmed prisoner of war, The Steel Helmet eventually generated over $2 million in ticket sales and earned Fuller an award from independent exhibitors for the top-grossing drama from 1948 to 1953.35 The film’s low cost and high gross made it a model for the potential profitability of a programmer. Opening the film first in Los Angeles and New York enabled it to generate positive critical attention and to illustrate the box-office draw of its timely subject matter; during its subsequent rollout, these two factors maintained the film’s status as a headliner capable of filling large houses.
Following the release of The Steel Helmet, Samuel Fuller was in high demand. Fuller’s work at Lippert, and particularly the success of The Steel Helmet, demonstrated his ability to shoot quickly and cheaply and still churn out a profitable film, and soon the majors came calling. In interviews, Fuller claims to have been wooed by production executives from most of the big studios, including MGM, Warner Bros., Twentieth Century–Fox, Universal, and Columbia. Eventually he settled on Fox. Although he could not hope to gain the creative and administrative control he eventually enjoyed at Lippert from a larger studio, working for a major provided Fuller with access to stars, increased budgets, longer shooting schedules, additional equipment, better distribution, and more publicity. In leaving Lippert for Fox, Fuller temporarily left the world of low-budget filmmaking to create his only series of genuine A pictures. At the same time, he adapted his aesthetic to meet the quality controls and streamlined production methods in use at the major studios, resulting in the most refined and classically constructed films of his career.
CHAPTER TWO
The Fox Years, 1951–1956
Fuller signed with Twentieth Century–Fox at the beginning of a tumultuous decade for the motion picture industry, a period that saw the end of the studio system. Production cutbacks that began in the early 1940s accelerated in the 1950s as the studios faced declining audience attendance, rising costs, and plunging profits. In an effort to counter the lure of television, radio, and other suburban entertainment options, the major studios shifted away from producing a balanced slate of A and B pictures designed for the whole family and looked to new strategies to differentiate their product. Dramatically reducing low-budget production, the majors concentrated their resources on spectacular, big-budget films that featured color, stereophonic sound, and widescreen processes, creating an experience unable to be replicated at home. At the same time, a piecemeal decline in industry regulation and censorship beginning in the late 1940s and culminating in the 1956 revision of the Production Code enabled more filmmakers to tackle adult-oriented fare that flaunted sex, violence, and social taboos to a degree not seen in mainstream domestic filmmaking since the early 1930s. Fuller’s contract with Fox enabled him to participate in many of these trends, as he had secured a job with a major studio that, at least temporarily, valued his penchant for visual experimentation and edgy material.
While Fuller’s decision to sign with Twentieth Century–Fox seems largely to have been based on his fondness for Darryl Zanuck, the studio’s longtime production head, Fuller’s background as an action director complemented the needs of the studio. From their first meeting, Zanuck and Fuller established a close relationship that flourished through the 1950s. Fuller expressed great admiration for Zanuck’s straightforwardness and commitment to strong storytelling, and Zanuck reveled in Fuller’s can-do spirit and real-life adventures. Both were equally fond of cigars and explosives, once apparently firing off a nine-millimeter German Luger in an underground screening room together.1 Although Zanuck’s interest in more “realistic” material remained firm, when Fuller arrived at Fox in the early 1950s the production head was steering the studio toward big-picture entertainment rooted in action and sex rather than the social problem films it produced at the end of the previous decade.2 As a director who had made a name for himself in action films but who still maintained an obsession with history and journalism, Fuller was a fine fit. All of the films he directed while under contract at Fox—Fixed Bayonets, Pickup on South Street, Hell and High Water, and House of Bamboo—were action-oriented war, crime, or adventure stories rooted in contemporary political and social conflicts.
Twentieth Century–Fox’s production chief, Darryl Zanuck (left), at a birthday party for Samuel Fuller (right) during the shooting of Hell and High Water. Zanuck and Fuller had a warm relationship and worked closely while Fuller was under contract at Fox. Chrisam Films, Inc.
The classical norms embraced by the major studios as a means of ensuring clarity, coherence, and quality had a decided impact on Fuller’s work. Now he was operating within a system of long-standing production practices fully ingrained in workers at every level of authority, a system that directly and indirectly influenced the choices available to filmmakers. During this period, the narratives of Fuller’s films adhere to classical, generic, and cultural conventions to a degree never again seen in his career, and his visual style becomes more refined and polished. Fuller’s artistic instincts are not completely buried, however. With the proper material and the support of the studio they could come very much to the fore or, alternately, they could express themselves in a more subtle fashion, achieving his favored effects while still reflecting classical norms. The proof of Fox’s influence on the expression of Fuller’s aesthetic is most clearly seen through comparison with his one independent project during this period, Park Row. If the Fox films are Fuller restrained, Park Row is Fuller unbound; the difference is palpable.
The Trade-offs of Studio Filmmaking
