Samuel Fuller

Merrill's Marauders

Brigadier General Frank D. Merrill leads the 3000 American volunteers of his 5307th Composite Unit (Provisional) aka "Merrill's Marauders" behind Japanese lines across Burma to Myitkyina pushing beyond their limits and fighting pitched battles at every strong-point.Format: DVD MOVIE Genre: ACTION/ADVENTURE/MILITARY & WAR UPC: 085391188421 Manufacturer No: 118842

The theatrical trailer included in this DVD release of Merrill's Marauders, touting its depiction of "World War II's most fabulous jungle fighters… (as) they showed the world what the American soldier can do," makes director Samuel Fuller's 1962 film sound like jingoistic propaganda, but it's considerably more than that. The year is 1944; the U.S. Army's 5307th Composite Unit, a 3000-strong outfit under the command of Brigadier General Frank Merrill (Jeff Chandler), has already been fighting the occupying Japanese forces in the wilds of Burma for several months when they're assigned to march hundreds of miles through jungles, swamps, and mountains to Myitkyina, a town of considerable strategic importance and the gateway to India, where the Allies fear the Japanese and Nazis will meet and consolidate their forces. Mission impossible? So it would seem, as the men are exhausted, disease-ridden, disheartened, and ill-equipped; his second in command, Lt. Stockton (Ty Hardin), argues that they'll never make it, but Merrill (who has a heart condition that could bring him down at any moment) refuses to let up. There are numerous combat sequences, most of them quite convincing (including a very cool scene in a concrete maze), but the film's strength lies not only in its graphic chronicling of the obvious horrors of war but in its sympathetic (but never condescending) portrayal of the more quotidian aspects of these soldiers' miserable lives, from easy banter to quarrels over food and ammunition, from the interactions with locals to the sheer hell of simply walking another step when you've already passed the limits of human endurance. Grim, gritty, intense, and realistic (Fuller was an Army vet himself), this is an effective precursor to the director's best-known movie, The Big Red One. --Sam Graham

Man in the Wilderness/The Deadly Trackers

He s taking the law and a gun into his own hands. Richard Harris (who played English Bob in Unforgiven and Albus Dumbledore in the first two Harry Potter films) brings bullet-hard ferocity to these tales of vengeance. He s a pacifist turned manhunter in The Deadly Trackers [Side A], aiming to settle a score with the killers of his wife and son. In Man in the Wilderness [Side B], Harris tackles a signature survivalist role reminiscent of his heroics in A Man Called Horse. He portrays Zachary Bass, given up for dead and fighting man and nature during his 600-mile Northwest Territory trek to avenge himself against the fellow trappers who abandoned him. Beware, two-faced friends. Bass is alive...and closing ground.

Fixed Bayonets

The story of a platoon during the Korean War. One by one Corporal Denno's superiors are killed until it comes to the point where he must try to take command responsiblity.System Requirements:Run Time: 92 minutesFormat: DVD MOVIE Genre: DRAMA Rating: NR UPC: 024543432838 Manufacturer No: 2243283

Not your typical star-studded or star-spangled war film, cult-fave director Samuel Fuller's Fixed Bayonets is a viscerally thrilling Korean War drama of one platoon's trial, and one corporal's baptism, under fire. Morale is high but the ammo is low for an American division hunkered down in the mountains of Korea. Certain massacre awaits if they retreat. To give "15,000 men a break," 48 "of our toughest combat men" are selected to stay behind and trick the "commies" into thinking the entire division is in place while the others escape safely across a river. Fixed Bayonets is raw and brutal in the best Fuller tradition. The backgrounds are obvious fakes, and the platoon members sport the usual war movie nicknames like Whitey, Rock, Jonesy, and "Mr. Belvedere" (he's the resident know-it-all). But all else has the authentic ring of reportage, as in a powerful scene when the men cluster together to rub their feet to ward off frostbite. Richard Basehart stars as Denno, who can "take an order, but can't give one" until his three superiors are knocked off one by one, leaving him in command. This rueful exchange--"They told me this was going to be a police action." "Why didn't they send the cops?"--is as close as Fuller gets to geopolitics. For war-movie buffs, he does deliver pounding and tense action sequences. In one harrowing scene, a medic must navigate a minefield to try and rescue a wounded sergeant and retrieve the only map to the field.. But he is resolutely unsentimental and more interested in the ravaged, human face of war. These are faces you will not soon forget (one of them, reportedly, belongs to James Dean, but this film is so gripping, one is hard-pressed to make the effort to try to spot him). --Donald Liebenson

Hell and High Water

A privately-financed scientist and his colleagues hire an ex-Navy officer (Widmark) to conduct an Alaskan submarine expedition in order to prevent a Red Chinese anti-American plot that may lead to World War III. Mixes deviously plotted schoolboy fiction with submarine spectacle and cold war heroics.Run Time: 103 minutesFormat: DVD MOVIE Genre: ACTION/ADVENTURE Rating: NR UPC: 024543436645 Manufacturer No: 2243664

Two reliable genres--submarine adventure and the threat of World War III--come together in director (and co-writer) Samuel Fuller's Hell and High Water, a 1954 film that remains surprisingly relevant more than half a century later. When an enormous nuclear explosion is traced to somewhere between the tip of northern Japan and the Arctic Circle, followed by the disappearance of a prominent French atomic scientist (Victor Francen), it's clear that something's up. Did the prof defect to the dark (actually, the Red) side? Was he abducted? As it turns out, he's actually part of a group of scientists, businessmen, and other distinguished gentlemen planning to send a sub to check out the scene and determine the extent of the threat. Enter Capt. Adam Jones (the redoubtable Richard Widmark), who agrees to helm the private, very secret mission for a hefty cash reward; enter also the professor's "assistant" (Bella Darvi), herself a skilled scientist who goes along for the ride, thereby quickening the pulse of every able-bodied sailor on board the sub, especially the captain's.

Hell and High Water was filmed in Technicolor and CinemaScope, as studios tried to induce audiences to abandon their TVs in favor of movie theaters; it also earned an Oscar nomination for its special effects, and considering the relatively primitive state of that art at the time, they're not bad. Fuller does a nice job of depicting the cramped, funky confines of our heroes' craft, a vessel of dubious seaworthiness captured from the Japanese during World War II. The plot, involving the Chinese's dastardly plan to incite a nuclear conflagration and blame the U.S., is preposterous; yet if you substitute North Korea or Iran for China, the notion of a rogue nation with atomic capabilities is no less timely now than then. Fuller largely avoids political flag-waving; his main point lies in a speech delivered (more than once) by the French professor: "Each man has his own reason for living… and his own price for dying." Extras include an interesting biography of Widmark from the A&E show of that same name. --Sam Graham

Classic Film Noir, Vol. 3 - 10 Movie Pack

Forty Guns

Forty Guns is the most rampantly sexualized Western ever made, and the most outrageous of Samuel Fuller's late-'50s B movies. Fuller's original title was "Woman with a Whip," referring to the hard-riding range baroness--Barbara Stanwyck, sporting silver hair and (most of the time) black, skintight man togs--who's "the boss of Cochise County" and a law unto herself. The forty guns are an army of pistoleros who accompany her just about everywhere, and Fuller misses no opportunity to exaggerate their macho assertiveness in black-and-white CinemaScope, whether thundering along the horizon or formed up on either side of a preposterously long dinner table with Stanwyck at its head. Barry Sullivan costars as a Wyatt Earp-like gunfighter who both threatens Stanwyck's empire and awakens her lust for something besides power. As one of his brothers, Gene Barry (soon to star in Fuller's mind-blowing Vietnam movie China Gate) enjoys a passionate liaison with a gunsmith's busty blond daughter (Eve Brent) whom he romances down the bore of a rifle--an image Jean-Luc Godard would memorialize in Breathless. In the relentlessly double-entendre dialogue and the blocking of scenes, everything takes on sexual overtones: power and impotence, political advantage and exclusion. Fuller and cameraman Joseph Biroc capture many sequences in single, minutes-long takes that often end in a death--and in one perverse instance, the revelation of a death that has occurred midway through without our knowing it. (It's a T.S. Eliot moment, though we won't insist on it.) Style is all in this movie, which will leave you either astonished or aghast. More likely, both. --Richard T. Jameson

Eclipse Series 5 - The First Films of Samuel Fuller (The Baron of Arizona / I Shot Jesse James / The Steel Helmet) (Criterion Collection)

His films have been called raw outrageous sensational and daring. In four decades of directing Samuel Fuller created a legendarily idiosyncratic oeuvre examining U.S. history and mythmaking in westerns film noirs and war epics. And characteristically it all began with a bang: after printing the legend with the elegant B-pictures I Shot Jesse James and The Baron of Arizona he got himself into hot water with the FBI on The Steel Helmet the first American movie to portray the Korean War. These three independent films showed off Fuller's genre diversity gutter wit and subversive force and pointed the way to a controversial career in studio moviemaking.Includes:I Shot Jesse JamesFuller's directorial debut is a psychological western excavating with pathos and humor the tale of Robert Ford the member of Jesse James's gang who shot the famed outlaw in the back.The Baron of ArizonaA devilishly witty Vincent Price plays a nineteenth-century con man who sets out to commit the most epic swindle in U.S. history: to claim himself as the rightful inheritor of Arizona.The Steel HelmetWith its low budget and high ambitions Fuller's snarling Korean War film an examination of race relations as well as a visceral plunge into battle remains one of the director's most discussed and admired works.System Requirements:Running Time: 262 Mins.Format: DVD MOVIE Genre: ACTION/ADVENTURE Rating: NR UPC: 715515025522 Manufacturer No: ECL022DVD

Pickup on South Street - Criterion Collection

Director Sam Fuller's biggest success of its time (and, superficially at least, his most conventional film) is the 1953 noir effort Pickup on South Street. Candy (Jean Peters) has her purse picked on the subway by small-time thief and ex-con Skip (Richard Widmark), neither of them realizing that the purse contains microfilm bound for Communist spies and that they are being watched the whole time by Federal agents. The New York police and the Feds catch up with Skip and try to cajole him into turning over the microfilm, but as he's one of Fuller's "outsider" antihero protagonists, the patriotic angle cuts no ice with him. He plays both sides against the middle when he finds out that the Communists are involved, hoping to make a big score off the deal, but eventually he comes around when he realizes that he's smitten with Candy. Finally Skip plays ball with the authorities, but is it out of his love for both his friend Moe and Candy, or is he swayed by the patriotic urgings of the FBI, or does it just come from some inner core of decency? You decide. When Skip is asked, "Do you know what treason is?" he smirks, "Who cares?"; when the Feds try to appeal to his patriotism, he sneers through several layers of Sinatra cool, "Are you waving the flag at me?" Pickup is set almost entirely in the garbage-strewn alleys, grimy subways, seedy waterfront dives, and gloomy streets of New York City; it's marked by extremely lengthy takes and fluid, mobile camera work. The closing scene when Skip tracks down another character in the subway and administers a brutal beating to him is one of the more violent scenes you'll find in '50s film noir. --Jerry Renshaw

Petty crook Skip McCoy (Richard Widmark) has his eyes fixed on the big score, but when he picks the purse of unsuspecting Candy (Jean Peters) he finds a haul bigger than he could imagine: a strip of microfilm bearing confidential U.S. secrets. Tailed by both Feds and the unwitting courier's Communist puppeteers, Skip and Candy find themselves in a precarious gambit that pits greed against redemption, Right versus Red, and passion against self preservation. A dazzling cast, hardboiled repartee and director Samuel Fuller's signature raw energy combine to create a true film noir classic.

Classic Western Collection - The Outlaws (The Proud Ones, Forty Guns, Broken Lance, The Culpepper Cattle Co.)

The Proud Ones: The main draw (and quick draw) of this 1956 Western is the marvelous presence of Robert Ryan in the lead role. This underappreciated actor plays a Kansas marshal with a history of perceived cowardice in his past. Everything comes to a head in a single week: a cattle drive ends in town, bringing shootin' and hollerin'; Ryan's nemesis, a casino-runner played by veteran bad guy Robert Middleton, arrives to soak the suckers; and young hotshot Jeffrey Hunter, whose father was killed by Ryan, arrives with revenge on his mind. Oh, and Ryan himself begins to suffer from blinding headaches. Despite the crowded plot, the results are Fifties Western boilerplate, with few distinguishing features beyond the cast. But the supporting ranks are crowded with essential horse-saga actors: Walter Brennan, Arthur O'Connell, Rodolfo Acosta, and of course the bearded, lizard-eyed Middleton. Virginia Mayo plays Ryan's hotel-keeper ladyfriend. Ace cinematographer Lucien Ballard gets a few good outdoor CinemaScope set-ups into the generally backlot feel of the thing. But the reason to see the film is lanky Robert Ryan, whose compelling mix of neurosis, gentleness, and fury is on full display here. --Robert Horton

Forty Guns: Forty Guns is the most rampantly sexualized Western ever made, and the most outrageous of Samuel Fuller's late-'50s B movies. Fuller's original title was "Woman with a Whip," referring to the hard-riding range baroness--Barbara Stanwyck, sporting silver hair and (most of the time) black, skintight man togs--who's "the boss of Cochise County" and a law unto herself. The forty guns are an army of pistoleros who accompany her just about everywhere, and Fuller misses no opportunity to exaggerate their macho assertiveness in black-and-white CinemaScope, whether thundering along the horizon or formed up on either side of a preposterously long dinner table with Stanwyck at its head. Barry Sullivan costars as a Wyatt Earp-like gunfighter who both threatens Stanwyck's empire and awakens her lust for something besides power. As one of his brothers, Gene Barry (soon to star in Fuller's mind-blowing Vietnam movie China Gate) enjoys a passionate liaison with a gunsmith's busty blond daughter (Eve Brent) whom he romances down the bore of a rifle--an image Jean-Luc Godard would memorialize in Breathless. In the relentlessly double-entendre dialogue and the blocking of scenes, everything takes on sexual overtones: power and impotence, political advantage and exclusion. Fuller and cameraman Joseph Biroc capture many sequences in single, minutes-long takes that often end in a death--and in one perverse instance, the revelation of a death that has occurred midway through without our knowing it. (It's a T.S. Eliot moment, though we won't insist on it.) Style is all in this movie, which will leave you either astonished or aghast. More likely, both. --Richard T. Jameson

Broken Lance: Broken Lance is a noble entry in the trend of adult Westerns of the early 1950s, scoring on a couple of fronts: (1) as a multigenerational saga, with Shakespearian overtones, of a family bickering over a giant ranch, and (2) as a grown-up look at the dilemma of the Native American... its title perhaps inspired by the Indian-friendly Broken Arrow? Spencer Tracy stars as the blustery patriarch of a cattle spread, threatened by pollution from a nearby copper mine as well as the shiftiness of his older sons (Richard Widmark, Hugh O'Brian, and Earl Holliman). Tracy's bluff characterization--as ever, he seems to be yanking at the script like a cat unraveling a ball of yarn--carries the film effortlessly along. The central character is actually his youngest and wisest son, played by Robert Wagner, who's not especially convincing as the mixed-race issue of Tracy's second marriage, to an Indian woman (Oscar nominee Katy Jurado). Edward Dmytryk directs in a style that could be called "intelligent," which is another way of saying "not very exciting." The early CinemaScope probably accounts for some of the static set-ups, although there are exteriors that are breathtaking (watching this film in its full-screen version would be crazy). The cast is certainly tops; Widmark is overqualified to play a third lead, but who's complaining? Most memorable is the loving relationship between Tracy's cattleman and his Indian wife, although the subject of Native Americans is secondary here (check out The Devil's Doorway and Apache for more overt Fifties looks at the topic). Veteran screenwriter Philip Yordan won an Oscar for his "original story," a curious and long-defunct Academy Award category. --Robert Horton

The Culpepper Cattle Co.: The Culpepper Cattle Company is a worthy example of a certain kind of early-1970s Western: deglamorized, unromantic, and frankly violent. This one begins in familiar terms, as a greenhorn lad (Gary Grimes, recently deflowered in Summer of '42) joins a cattle drive, surrendering himself to the extremely focused leadership of boss Frank Culpepper (the authentically Western Billy "Green" Bush). The episodes that follow are engrossing and colorful, and the drive gets more interesting when a quartet of lethal hombres (among them Bo Hopkins, Luke Askew, and wild-eyed Geoffrey Lewis) join the ride. The business of frontier justice--which here usually means shooting strangers just to be on the safe side--is worked out in refreshingly unheroic ways. Clearly director Dick Richards (making his debut in a relatively brief directing career) is responding to the revisionist era, and specifically to the films of the great Sam Peckinpah; this movie's climax is a scaled-down nod to The Wild Bunch. Probably too scaled-down, given the somewhat abrupt ending. The music uses themes from Jerry Goldsmith's terrific score for The Flim-Flam Man, released five years earlier. Culpepper got lost in the flurry of revisionist westerns that sounded similar themes: The Cowboys, The Great Northfield, Minnesota Raid, and by far the best of this group, Robert Benton's Bad Company. All were released in 1972, a high-water mark for re-thinking the genre. --Robert Horton

Episode Description: GiftSet Includes the Following Titles:

**Culpepper Cattle Co. **The Proud Ones **Broken Lance **Forty Guns

White Dog